A Bit Off...

Yesterday, I woke up late. It was usual for someone who's in the GY shift to sleep late, even on their day-offs. Woke up late, had lunch,reinstalled one of my linux partitions. Normal day, 'cept I had to
work last night. I went to work without sleeping another wink. So this
morning I was dead tired. I was about to collapse into bed when I realized that I should finish setting up my Ubuntu partition so i could set it up to download stuff while I sleep.

So, I updated Ubuntu with all the file-sharing software I could find. The first one I installed was called GTK-Gnutella (http://gtk-gnutella.sourceforge.net). I found it alright, but I had a learning curve to overcome before I doze off uncontrollably. I settled on Limewire because I've had experience using it. You can get Limewire at http://www.limewire.com. I set-up Limewire to download the first .ISO disc of the Mandrake Limited Edition 2005 (info here: http://beta.mandriva.com) . These files takes really long to download, as they are really big files ready to burn to CD's. An .ISO's typical size ranges from 600 to &700 MB. I left the computer on and slept.

I was rudely awakened at 2pm, by a call from my mother-in-law. The Smart Wifi people were at her place and they needed the admin password for her desktop over there. I had given it a password so they wouldn't go onlines using the Windows Administrator access. That would've been a careless way to roam the net. Paranoid me.

After the short call, I took a peek at the comp. Limewire was stuck at
16% with a download rate of 10 B/sec. I had to remedy this and find a
better way to download this stuff. Like Rene Descartes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descartes#Philosophical_legacy) waking
from a dream, I was struck by a sudden realization that I had forgotten a small program I discovered a few months back. I never did try it out since downloading it through my dial-up connection would take days. It was a download accelarator for GNU/Linux called Prozilla. Oh, the irony of it all. I immediately fetched it from the Ubuntu servers. Luckily, they had a copy. I also got ProzGUI,the graphic application that partnered with Prozilla. You can read about it here: http://prozilla.genesys.ro/ .

What I was after was the ability to resume downloads and the ability to span numerous sources. With Limewire, I was stuck with 1 source (that was all I could find, but its possible to have many) for the file I was getting. With Prozilla, I could go to an FTP or HTTP mirror of a download site and it will look for other mirrors to get other sections of the download. It gets the fastest mirrors and checks for faster connections every 30 seconds (i think). It switches to faster servers if it finds any. During the time it took me to write this entry, Prozilla had already downloaded 6% of the first CD and 3% of the 2nd. That's FAST! Considering the fact that each .ISO was 700MB.

I'll be dozing off again so I must bid you adieu. I'm leaving my comp
on to max out my connection. I need to do this to make sure the new
Smart Wifi antenna isn't defective -- again. I'm concentrating on
bandwidth intensive stuff to see how far it goes. That's it for now.
Ciao!

--
"Coffee is evil...a necessary evil."-

Daysleeper Ed
Registered Linux User # 398135