Revised subject: 4.0.2 DVD and CD out now.

[ckamin]

One quick note about the FTP/HTTP Mirrors. Many of the files located in these mirrors are not yet complete. I would assume they are downloading them presently. The DVD isos appear to be most affected, but I have seen improper sizes listed for the CD as well, on occasion. I would give the Mirrors a chance to get the files up before downloading from there.

BitTorrent certainly appears to be the way to go at the moment. I downloaded both the DVD and the CD isos in less than one day, AND they BOTH passed the MD5Sum checks. I have heard from others, and have seen a few posts regarding boot failures, etc., that I can categorize as issues due to poor download integrity. I have heard nothing about issues with a successful BitTorrent download that was attributable to the downloaded file or the download process. What you can do to mess up the file after it downloaded is left up to one's own imagination. It amazes me to see that someone can spend hours downloading a file of DVD size, only to mess it up by not spending a few more minutes burning the files to disc SLOWLY, or to use media of questionable quality or compatibility.

I have counseled a few people that had bad downloads from an FTP Mirror. I instructed them to retry a download with BitTorrent and point the program to save the file to the same folder as the original download. It was able to "Fix" the bad downloads and only needed to download a part of the file to do so.

It appears that the US Mirrors are usually the last in line. I could be wrong about this, but I base this on personal observation.

If you are having trouble downloading using the BitTorrent, there are many things you can do to ensure that the process works as well as it can. These options have been posted elsewhere and are discussed in the Faqs at the BitTorrent site. One of the most important is to allow enough time to establish good peer connections. I saw times when my bit rate dropped under 10, but it usually picked up again and proceeded as expected. I did upload (seed) about three or four times the file sizes so far and it is continuing to seed from two locations when I can do so.

One other note about download speeds. I have a couple of contacts that both use the same ISP. They Both had poor download speeds with BitTorrent, although their throughput is usually close to double what I can achieve with other applications. I would suspect that there is something set by the ISP that prevents full speed torrent downloads, although it could just be coincidence. They are looking into it at the moment and will keep me posted.

[mag046]

I run Azureus and specify the port that it uses for connection(s). You don't have to specify a range, just a single port...then log into your router/firewall and enter the "port-forwarding" information required by your router that correspond with:

1. The IP of the box running BT (DHCP or static - doesn't matter)
2. The port number that you assigned in the client config

Enable the "forwarding" until you are done, then disable it. You can turn "forwarding" on and off as you wish, it only involves logging into your router.

I have yet to find any reliable mirrors hosting the DVD, the bandwidth costs would be outragious. I used BT and it took me 3 hours on the night it was posted. Not many seeders at the time, but speed was fast enough. By opening a port for BT, my speeds have consistently been near that of a direct FTP or HTTP connection.

To restate the obvious...md5 the images before wasting your time and discs with a bad burn.

Game on...

[Harry Kuhman]

They are looking into it at the moment and will keep me posted.

Thanks for the feedback, please do keep us posted. My fisrt thought is that your friends may not have theire routers and firewalls set up properly, by desgin BitTorrent will download slowly if you are not set up to share. If the ISP is playing games, advise your friends that while BitTorrent usess a default set of ports, it is not restricted to using ports in that range. If an ISP is playing games with BitTorrent, which would be in direct violation of the recently released FCC directive FCC 05-151, (assuming that your firend's ISP is in the U.S.A.), they are likely doing this by watching for traffic on the common BitTorrent ports. Your friends could configure their BitTorrent clients to use ports outside of the default range, if there is a sudden improvement which goes away when they go back to the default ports then the ISP is certainly causing problems. The above FCC document states clearly that users buying internet service shuld be free to use any applications or an hardware that does not harm the network, subject to potential requirements by law enforcement. So it should be against FCC policy for an ISP to block or disrupt BitTorrent traffic.

[Harry Kuhman]

I run Azureus and specify the port that it uses for connection(s). You don't have to specify a range,

Actually, anyone can use just one port. The range of port numbers was originally intended for allowing more than one torrnt to be uploaded or seeded at once. And as I understand it now even the Official BitTorrent client has been changed slightly to allow multiple torrents to be handeled over a single port number.

Many routers now have a feature in them for port forwarding called "special application" or "trigger application". If your router has this capability you don't need to worry about forwarding the port each time. You set up the router so that when it see outbound activity on any of the ports (or the one port) that you use for BitTorrent it then forwards all inbound traffic on the ports to the local IP address that triggered the activity. After the BitTorrent trafic stops the router disables port forwarding automatically. Then if you run BitTorrent again later on that system or on any other computer it will forward the BitTorrent port or ports to that computer. This is very handy, it lets me use BitTorrent for any of my systems without having to make further router changes at all.

[ckamin]

Thanks for the feedback, please do keep us posted.

I will be stopping by to visit at least one of these people , if not both, having this difficulty over this next weekend. I doubt it is a router/firewall concern since these people are somewhat competent with things that run on electrons, but you never know. I intend to bring one of my laptops along, since I know it will download well from most connections I plug it into. One of these people took well over two days to download the DVD and about 22 hours for the CD. They were both able to download a different CD iso file in about a half hour or so at both locations, by FTP, so something is seriously wrong. I downloaded the files starting a little before they did and my downloads completed in much less than a day for both the CD and DVD. All three of us are using BitTorrent 4.04, so at least that variable is in check.

These people are both in the US and within a few miles of each other, so it's not likely to be an issue with the great firewall of China.

I doubt their ISP would intentionally do something to frustrate BitTorrent, but something might be wrong there also. They are a large provider and would probably not take the chance of doing something illegal or improper. I'm sure they would be eager to correct something if it is on their end. BitTorrent DOES work, just very slowly on the download side. The only thing I could think of is that they might be doing something to frustrate illegal file sharing for some reason, since BitTorrent is sometimes used for those purposes.

I'm sure I will have a better handle on it over the weekend. I will keep you posted on the results.

[mag046]

I am not a heavy "port forwarding" user, but I have to tell you "port triggering" is a thing of beauty!

Thanks Harry, you have just saved me valuable router config time...now I have to find something else to fill that gap!

[Harry Kuhman]

I am not a heavy "port forwarding" user, but I have to tell you "port triggering" is a thing of beauty!

Yea, port forwarding can be a pain sometimes, particularly if you have a router that does not always assign the same local address to each system by DHCP. Using port triggering doesn't help in some circumstances, such as web servers or ftp servers where the application doesn't send out the packet first or keep packet traffic active, but for applications like BitTorrent it's great.

[Zoltan]

Or, of course, you can do what you did and complain about the mirrors. How is that working for you?

It's certainly working better than BitTorrent.

I've got the EN CD and the GE DVD.

Sooner or later, somebody will post these (and the EN DVD) to usenet, as they have the previous versions.
I can download from usenet at 20 times the speeds I'm getting from BitTorrent.

a.b.warex.linux, a.b. boneless, and a.b.ftd seem to be popular.

The Uni-Kaiserslautern site has the EN DVD, but it's no faster than BitTorrent.

[Harry Kuhman]

It's certainly working better than BitTorrent.

Well, many people, including myself, seem to be getting safe, fast, even amazing results with bittorrent. If you insist on not doing the setup that would get you similar results that's perfectly fine with me, but I'm not clear on why you want to keep posting about your inability to get something to work that so many others can, particularly when you have made it clear that you do not want help.

[tablet_guy]

For those of you who do not want to or cannot burn a cd/dvd,
I just have updated the minirt_ntfs.gz file
for Knoppix 4.0.2 Patch Update 2005-09-23 CD & DVD.
This minirt_ntfs.gz file is required to boot knoppix from the iso file, cf:
http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtop...1796&start=276 and Windows Partition PMI
Have fun et let me know if it is working for you.
Thanks, Gilles

Your initrd and Knoppix 4.0.2 worked like magic! It boots really fast, and unionfs seems to work much better (a firefox update to 1.0.7 went smoothly, unlike a similar update with V. 3.9). alhtouhg it does fail on the rather tricky X.org update (using the ufs image, without HD installing, of course). if anyone is able to get the Xorg update working could you please post how you managed it?

thanks ruymbeke, for your very useful initrd/grub work.