FC2 bittorrent servers: send MD5SUM first

John Reiser jreiser at BitWagon.com
Thu Feb 12 21:06:43 UTC 2004


Please send the MD5SUM file first.  That way a user with a slow connection
can do a useful sanity check by hand when the first .iso completes, which
may be a long time (hours) before all the .iso finish.  If the files
get sent in alphabetical order, then rename it 00_MD5SUM or the like.

All of this depends on the bittorrent clients+servers transfering a whole
directory file-by-file, instead of as random pieces from all the files.
File-by-file is a good policy because it has better out-of-band error
recovery: it is much more likely that some whole files have been transfered,
and thus may be useful even if the whole directory has not been sent yet.

[Yes, there is checkisomd5 in the ananconda-tools package; but md5sum is
always installed, while ananconda-tools is rare.]

-- 
John Reiser, jreiser at BitWagon.com





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