Downloading Fedora Core 7 over slow internet connection

Downloading Fedora Core 7 over slow internet connection – through proxy

I wanted to download FC7 DVD iso, which is a 2.8GB file. My office network gives average speed, but regular & accelerated download attempts failed. I tried various servers, but all failed after some 200-800MB.

At home I tried download using Bittorrent, which was successful to an extent over my 48kbps gprs access (download speed was only 1-18kbps). Download progress was something like 200-300MB per day. Though it may steadly progress and get complete in 5-10 days, it was very costly indeed to download over gprs connection. Back at office, torrent over wget http/ftp clicked my mind, here is how I downloaded the entire 2.8GB iso file in 2 days.

Download the list of servers from http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/publiclist/Fedora/7/ to PublicActiveMirrors.html
# wget http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/publiclist/Fedora/7/ -O PublicActiveMirrors.html

Extract all http server lists from the file
# grep ‘>http<’ PublicActiveMirrors.html | cut -f2 -d\” | awk ‘{printf (“%s/%s\n”,$0,”Fedora/i386/iso/F-7-i386-DVD.iso”)}’ > urls.txt

Now use the following csh script to loop indefenitly and wget with –continue option
# Retry till I kill it!!!
while echo
do
        for url in `cat urls.txt`
        do
                wget -c -t 3 -w 20 -v $url
                sleep 60
        done
        sleep 120
done

I got my ISO ready in less than 2 days.
# ls -l F-7-i386-DVD.iso
-rw-r–r– 1 ajcl users 2900602880 May 27 20:12 F-7-i386-DVD.iso

You may also download the SHA1SUM from any download mirror above and check if downloaded ISO is alright.
# sha1sum -c SHA1SUM

I verified the ISO using QEMU as well, now I will burn it on to a DVD and upgrade my FC5 to FC7