Quote Originally Posted by ireland
secondly heres today new problem. i started to d/l knoppix off another, differnt mirror site last night, left the machine on and came down about an hour ago to see that hte download has completed, or so it told me. the dialogue box said 686MB in 5h 53min from cslab.vt.edu i then went start>run>command and typed the location of where i had saved the .iso file to. following that i typed "md5sum -c KNOPPIX_V3.8.1-2005-04-08-EN.iso" it told me that there was an error in the exe file. i was using md5sum.exe which was in the same folder as knoppix_xxx.iso.
There are so many things wrong with this it's hard to know where to start. You don't want to check an exe file, you want to check an ISO. You don't look inside the ISO for anything (at this point you don't even trust the ISO). You download a tiny md5 file from the same mirror that you got the ISO from and use a Windows or DOS tool to check the ISO that you downloaded. I like MD5summer but there are plenty of MD5 test programs. I just found out last night that recent versions of Quickpar will do the MD5 test for you, and will do it in a cleaner way than the GUI of some MD5 programs. So if you have a current copy of Quickpar then you already have a program that will do the job.

Had you used BitTorrent the check would not be needed. BitTorrent contains it's own checksums that verify the download. And it is not only more reliable but faster than the mirrors. BitTorrent does deliver the md5 file too in the package so you can do the test if you wish. At this point I see no reason for anyone other than those behind firewalls that they can not control to use the mirrors (such as those stealing bandwidth from work). Of course, the poeple who skip past advice to check the md5 sum because they have never used md5 are likely to skip past the advice to use the most widely used download tool on the planet because they have not used it before, so I'm likely wasting my time here.

Quote Originally Posted by ireland
If you're dowloading other than by torrent, you really do need to use a decent download manager: doing it through a browser is asking for trouble.
i have asked and recieved the trouble so now im going to look into a decent download manager as i do not have torrent installed on the machine. thanks for that advice.
IMHO, download managers are a nightmare. Most are plagued by adware and spyware add-ons. They often cause serious problems for their victims, er..., users. So what if you don't have BitTorrent installed? You don't have the download manager installed. I sure hope you didn't rush and install one before I could respond, and do so without researching what it's going to infect your system with. Why do that when BitTorreent is far more popular and is said to now be the most widely accept IP protocol on the Internet? It's very simple to set up:

  • Get a copy here. I would go for 4.02 but you can try the beta if you want.

    Run the simple and fast installer.

    If you have a router (and shame on you if you are running a high speed service without one, consider getting one right away. Tun off your computer now, go out and buy one. I mean this!) then you need to forward a few ports to your BitTorrent system. How you do this is router dependent and covered well here. You can just forward ports 6881 to 6889 to the IP address you will run BitTorrent from. My router, like almost all but the oldest routers, has a feature that lets outgoing traffic trigger port forwarding. This is very handy for me since I can set up BitTorrent as a "triger application" and then no matter what computer I run BitTorrent from, the proper ports get forwarded to it. So I just create a entry in the table that watches for trigger traffic, when it sees an outbound packet on ports 6881 to 6889 it forwards that range to the system that sent the outbound packet. All done.


I shouild mention that the above port triggering approach is a simple way to do it, but it only would allow one system behind the firewall to use BitTorrent at any one time. There are certainly ways to set up BitTorrent and the firewall so that multiple users could use BitTorrent at the same time. There seems to be no need to go into them here.

The bottom line is that BitTorrent is the right way to do it. Even if it took a little more work to use it would be the right way. But it does not take more work over dealing with some of the damn download managers