Fedora Core 2 Distribution Size

[Gene C.]

On Saturday 03 January 2004 11:20, seth vidal wrote:
> > In general, http is "encouraged" for downloading of updates and
> > individual packages for FC (up2date also uses it).  To me this makes lots
> > of sense since the various proxy servers in the network can do a much
> > better job of load balancing than running multiple ftp servers with
> > rotating access via dns.
> >
> > However, I noticed that when the ISOs are downloaded, ftp is forced.  Is
> > there some reason for this.  I would think that the same load balancing
> > logic that applied for packages would also ally to the ISO images.
>
> ftp is forced? forced from where? You can download the iso images from
> the duke mirror, for example, via http.

for http://download.fedora.redhat.com ISO image downloads are forced ... This 
was mentioned on one of these mailing lists by one of the folks from Red Hat.

So I checked, and sure enough, http was used until I tried downloading the ISO 
images ... I forget if I just used lftp and noticed the switch there of if I 
needed to run tcpdump ... regardless, it does switch ... I assume that the 
httpd conf has aliases st up to force ftp for the images.

This may or may not be true for any of the mirror sites.

My question is ... why did Red Hat force ftp? ... it certainly seems 
intentional ... what don't I understand about HTTP, proxy servers, and lare 
files?
-- 
Gene