[NBLUG/talk] Debian vs. Others

[Eric Eisenhart]

On Wed, Apr 02, 2003 at 04:55:56PM -0500, Chris White wrote:
> As an aside to this discussion, I noticed that Mark was using Red Hat 9. 
> I can't seem to locate it on Red Hat's Web site (and their FTP server has
> been full up), but I tried http://mirror.nblug.org and found it.  That's
> the good news.  The bad news is that I at first I wasn't able to download
> it.  The HTTP server says the files are forbidden.  Then I tried a Linux
> ftp client.  I can't do an ls on the ftp server, nor can I download any
> files.

You should *really* try using ncftp instead of "ftp".

It's not on RedHat's FTP site because it's not out yet.  RedHat 9 comes out
on Tuesday.

Even better: use rsync.  Really.  I swear.

> Then I thought, I'll try FTP Explorer on WinDoze.  I got right in and I'm
> downloading the files.  So, let me see: my Web browser (Mozilla) doesn't
> work, the Red Hat Linux ftp client doesn't work, but a WinDoze FTP client
> does.  Is this a bug or a feature? :-) Any ideas?

HTTP didn't work because it's configured to only allow ISO access to IPs
belong to our ISP (Sonic.net) due to bandwidth constraints.  FTP turned out
not to be quite so easy to do that with...  the old "ftp" is terribly
feature-poor; in particular, it can't detect which FTP mode will work
automatically.  If "ls" doesn't work, then nothing will.  "ncftp" is smarter
(and easier to use) and probably would've worked.

But, seriously, you want rsync.  No, really.  You want rsync.

FTP and HTTP both, theoretically, support continuation of a download from
where you left off.  Sometimes it works, too.  Rsync really *does* support
continuing from where you left off, and reliably.

rsync -Ppv --block-size=8192 rsync://mirror.nblug.org/mirror/redhat/9/en/iso/i386/ .

(did I happen to mention that you should really be using rsync for this?)

If you've got a partial download from something else (HTTP, FTP, whatever)
then just drop it into your current directory with the correct name (case
matters) and run the above rsync command; after verifying that what you have
matches, it will continue downloading from there.  If it gets stopped, it
will keep what it's got and you can try again later.  This even works for
repairing some kinds of corruption; if you have 100% of an ISO, but it's
slightly wrong, then just use rsync and it'll find the blocks that don't
match and resend just those.

In other words: rsync uses less of our bandwidth and less of your time.  You
want rsync.
-- 
Eric Eisenhart
NBLUG Co-Founder & Vice-President Pro Tempore
The North Bay Linux Users Group
http://nblug.org/
eric at nblug.org, IRC: Freiheit at freenode, AIM: falschfreiheit, ICQ: 48217244