On Fri, Aug 27, 2010 at 01:04:10AM +0200, Carlos E. R. wrote:
On 2010-08-26 21:27, Josef Wolf wrote:
On Thu, Aug 26, 2010 at 04:03:00PM +0200, Carlos E. R. wrote:
Caveat: it requires that the metalink metadata contains error correction blocks. The DVD links at suse do. The system works by redownloading a bad block, and the dvd link has 129 such blocks of ~33 MB.
With a wrong Content-Length header, all chances are gone, IMHO.
Indeed...
Perhaps if you find an http downloader that works in smaller chunks. I mean: download 1MB starting at 123MB. If I'm interpreting the problem correctly.
Many download managers do that and the Content-length header won't be a problem then. However, the Content-range header still needs to be handled correctly for the large sizes, because otherwise the responses for chunks above 4GB will be incorrect. Thus, the download managers downloading in chunks are powerless as well, in the situation with the broken proxy. Other problems than broken proxies the Metalink-capable download managers can handle fine. Torrent client are also designed to handle such errors, however don't need only HTTP access. The mirrors themselves are checked by mirrors.opensuse.org for correct operation with files larger than 4GB. If they don't do this correctly, download.opensuse.org will not redirect (requests to DVDs) to them. Last year, 30% of mirrors still couldn't do this correctly, so it's an important check.
Once a download is bad, probably rsync is more efficient at correcting it. Do we have this info easily found in the wiki, near the download page?
A torrent downloader can also correct it.
But what do you do if your only access is HTTP via proxy?
HTTPS could help as well :-) Maybe there's a chance that the proxy supports large files via FTP, at least. Manually picking an FTP mirror from mirrors.opensuse.org might be worth a try, if one is stuck behind such a legacy proxy. Peter