Messages

1

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: orbit downloader 1.0-the fastest free download manager.

« on: May 14, 2007, 11:42 AM »

Thanks for posting this...

I find it pretty interesting, as Orbit supports Metalink and a good number of people are using it because of that. Of course I wouldn't want to endorse a spyware product. For me, Orbit seems to work really well.

I have noticed some spam emails with titles taken from filenames in my My Documents directory. Pretty specific filenames. Has anyone else noticed this? I don't want to imply this is from Orbit, could be from anything.

2

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Metalink for download managers (easy segmented d/ls, mirrors, checksums)

« on: November 23, 2006, 03:39 PM »

This is an invitation to check out Metalink. This is an XML format that lists download resources (mirrors, p2p) and checksums or signatures, along with alot of other info. Download managers can filter downloads by mirror location, OS, language, etc...That is, you could have one link for every language, OS, and world wide mirrors, and the download manager can automatically get the correct language/OS combo from the closest or highest priority servers.

Multiple resources (mirrors/p2p) increase reliability and availability. They can also be used for easy segmented downloads which (depending on your connection and mirrors) can increase download speeds 4x or more. The checksums and signatures guarantee file integrity.

Most major download managers on Windows, Mac, and Unix support Metalink now or will soon. Try aria2 (command line, Unix, Windows), wxDownload Fast (GUI, Unix, Windows), GetRight (GUI, Windows), and Speed Download (GUI, Mac).

Metalink is used by OpenOffice.org, Eiffel Software, PC-BSD, DesktopBSD, TrueBSD, Arch Linux, openSUSE, and other distributions.

Here's a better description:
http://www.linux.com...sid=06/11/01/1641247

Getting popular software off the Internet can sometimes be a struggle, even with all the mirrors and BitTorrent Samaritans out there. When the Fedora project released Fedora Core 6 last month, for instance, even several dozen mirrors weren't enough to serve everyone, and torrent speeds weren't good enough because of a scarcity of seeders. But thanks to Metalink I was able to sleep while my FC6 ISOs were downloading.

Metalink is an open standard that claims to make downloading easier, faster, and more reliable by helping users extract the last drop of juice out of their connection. But Metalink isn't your run-of-the-mill download accelerator. It is in fact a framework for use by other download clients, and bundles traditional HTTP and FTP methods of downloading files along with BitTorrent.

The Metalink standard replaces static URLs with a .metalink file, which is a simple XML file. The file in turn contains locations of all the mirrors of the application you want to download. In addition to HTTP and FTP mirrors and rsync, Metalink supports several P2P methods as well, including BitTorrent, ed2k, and magnet links. For example, the OpenOffice.org metalink contains links to more than 50 HTTP and FTP servers and a torrent.

If I were using a regular hyperlink to download OpenOffice.org and the server went down midway through the transfer, I would be left with an incomplete transfer that could either be resumed or not depending on the download client. But with Metalink, if one server goes down, the client software simply jumps to another mirror and resumes downloading from that point. In effect, this increases reliability, as all listed servers would need to be down for the file to be unavailable.

Files downloaded with metalinks are automatically verified. Metalink supports both MD5SUM and SHA1SUM checksums as well as PGP signatures, which are embedded in the .metalink file itself. Checksums are unique for every file, like a fingerprint. If there's an error in transfer, or if someone has maliciously replaced a good file with a bad one, the checksums won't match. If that happened with another file transfer method, you'd have to download the file again from another mirror. With Metalink, if the application you are downloading has a torrent, Metalink can use a torrent's partial file or chunk checksums to verify mirror downloads as well. If only a small chunk of a download has errors, Metalink just re-downloads that part instead of the whole file.

This is what a .metalink file would look like:

[Select]

<metalink version="3.0" xmlns="http://www.metalinker.org/">
  <files>
    <file name="example.ext">
    <verification>
      <hash type="md5">example-md5-hash</hash>
      <hash type="sha1">example-sha1-hash</hash>
      <signature type="pgp"/>
    </verification>
    <resources>
      <url type="ftp" location="us" preference="90">ftp://ftp.example1.com/example.ext</url>
      <url type="ftp" location="uk" preference="90">ftp://ftp.example2.com/example.ext</url>
      <url type="http" location="us" preference="90">http://www.example1.com/example.ext</url>
      <url type="http" location="uk" preference="90">http://www.example2.com/example.ext</url>
      <url type="http" location="de" preference="90">http://www.example3.com/example.ext</url>
      <url type="bittorrent" preference="100">http://www.ex.com/example.ext.torrent</url>
      <url type="magnet"/>
      <url type="ed2k"/>
    </resources>
    </file>
  </files>
</metalink>

I'd be interested in any comments you guys have, and if you try it how much it increases your download speed.