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You can meet these annoying problems when downloading from internet :

• No Resume Download.
• No Mirrors available.
• No Simultaneous Download.

These tricks can solve all those problems. Just continue reading…

Get the correct Download Manager.

A good download manager must have these features :

1. Support multiple download.
2. You can limit your bandwidth.
3. Support downloading from mirrors.
4. Can Resume Download (Pause and Start again).
5. Simultaneous download, and you must be able to set maximum connections per server and per download.
6. You can set the lowest speed when download must be restarted.
7. Can find mirrors automatically.

For those features, I suggest you to use Free Download Manager. Not only those features, it has more features :

• Scheduler.
• Shutdown when done.
• Auto Hang up for dial up connection.
• Exit program when done.
• Flash video download for websites like youtube, and convert them into other formats (mpg, avi, etc).
• Bittorrent download !
• Site Explorer. Browse FTP or a website and show the files just like usual file explorer.
• Site Manager. You can manage username and password per server if needed. And you can customize individual settings for every server.
• HTML Spider. Need to download a whole website ? You can set the file types and download depth.
• IT IS FREE !

Simultaneous download and Download Mirrors.

Even after using download manager above, sometimes you can’t do simultaneous download because it can not find mirrors and the origin server doesn’t support resuming.

FDM uses 1 of 2 mirror search websites available : FindFiles.com and FileSearching.com. If FDM is using FindFiles, make sure to check FileSearching.com manually and put the results (if available) on “Mirror” tab from “Download Properties”.

And it’s also good to put the faster mirrors on top or use the fastest as main download source.

Create your secret mirror.

But if you can not find mirrors, you have to create mirrors manually. The idea is very simple. If you have a hosting account with PHP and URL fopen capabilities, then you already have a mirror. You only need this html and php script :

Save as index.html
<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0" width="100%" height="100%">
<tr>
 <td width="100%" height="10%">
  <form action="get.php" method="post">
  <input type="text" name="url"/>
  <input type="submit" value="Download this URL"/>
  </form>
 </td>
</tr>
<tr>
 <td width="100%" height="90%">
  <iframe src="../download/" width="100%" height="100%" style="border: none; padding: none; margin: none"/>
 </td>
</tr>
</table>

Save as get.php
<?php
if (!empty($_REQUEST["url"])) {
 $fcnt = file_get_contents($_REQUEST["url"]);
 $fname = “download/” . basename($_REQUEST["url"]);
 if (!empty($fcnt)) {
  $fh = fopen($fname, “w”);
  fwrite($fh, $fcnt);
  fclose($fh);
 }
}
header(”location: index.html”);
?>

Put those two files in a directory, for example : secretmirror, and create download directory inside. CHMOD 777 or 666 download directory.

The structure will look like this :
<secretmirror>
-- <download>
-- index.html
-- get.php

Go to http://yoursite.com/secretmirror/ :

Put the URL of the file you want to download on the input box. Click Download this URL button and wait. After finished, you can use http://yoursite.com/secretmirror/download/file-name.exe as mirror.

If you have more than one hosting accounts, they will really help. There are many free hosting account on the internet with php and URL fopen capabilities.

Usually hosting companies have very fast internet connection. So it’s good to use them as mirrors.

About Sourceforge.net

SourceForge.net is the place for open source projects. If you want to download from one of the project, you should also try their mirrors from around the world, not only the one nearest from you :

Asia
jaist : Ishikawa, Japan
nchc : Tainan, Taiwan

Australia
optusnet : Sydney, Australia

Europe
switch : Lausanne, Switzerland
puzzle : Bern, Switzerland
mesh : Duesseldorf, Germany
dfn : Berlin, Germany
heanet : Dublin, Ireland
garr : Bologna, Italy
surfnet : Amsterdam, The Netherlands
kent : Kent, UK

North America
superb-west : Seattle, Washington
superb-east : McLean, Virginia
internap : San Jose, CA

South America
ufpr : Curitiba, Brazil

To use this simply replace http://surfnet.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/projectname/file.tar.gz with the mirrors above. Input each one of them as mirrors on your download manager.

Limitation

These tricks work with most common downloads. For token-based download such as rapidshare, they won’t work.

Tags: dial up, download, download manager, flash, flash video, free hosting, hosting, html, mirror, php, resume, software, speed, spider, url, URL fopen

This entry was posted on Friday, May 16th, 2008 at 8:01 am and is filed under tips and tricks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.