downloading from site fails. bittorrent?

[Bobbele]

I, too, have big problems downloading either of the latest two releases. If I do get a better download rate than 2 - 4 K/s at all, the server is resetting the connection a few bytes before completion. I've tried with Orbit Downloader (no good at all) and wget. It's really frustrating... I'd also like to see an MD5sum to check the download, if it should ever work some time.

Now, after about 50 attempts, I finally succeeded in downloading the 32-bit version of the ISO-Image with wget. Downloading a legal copy of a freely available linux distribution really shouldn't be that hard... After all, this is not some obscure underground warez scene server, where illegal downloads have to be hidden behind encrypted relinks.

Using the real name of the image (stresslinux_32bit_11.3.i686-0.6.105.iso.bz2) instead of that obscure number (34) at the end of the official download link suddenly increased my download speed dramatically from 2-4 K/s to 179 K/s. The real name of the image you wish to download can be found in the first column on the download page.
Official download link for the 32-bit ISO image: http://www.stresslinux.org/sl/downloads/34
Download link I used instead: http://www.stresslinux.org/sl/downloads/stresslinux_32bit_11.3.i686-0.6.105.iso.bz2

What also helped was the automatic removal of the download fragments from my unsuccessful attempts before every new attempt and configuring wget for unlimited retries. I'm currently working on a windows machine and placed the following batch file (download.bat) in wget's bin-directory:
------- snip --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
@echo off
if not exist done\ md done\
if exist stresslinux_32bit_11.3.i686-0.6.105.iso.bz2* move /Y stresslinux_32bit_11.3.i686-0.6.105.iso.bz2* done\
if exist stresslinux_64bit_11.3.x86_64-0.6.105.iso.bz2* move /Y stresslinux_64bit_11.3.x86_64-0.6.105.iso.bz2* done\
wget --no-check-certificate -t0 -b www.stresslinux.org/sl/downloads/stresslinux_32bit_11.3.i686-0.6.105.iso.bz2
wget --no-check-certificate -t0 -b www.stresslinux.org/sl/downloads/stresslinux_64bit_11.3.x86_64-0.6.105.iso.bz2
------- snip --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Replacing www.stresslinux.org with the ip address of the stresslinux server (83.141.20.131) didn't resolve my download troubles, but it revealed a ssh-connection (https; port 443) and the (true?) identity of the server (https://xen-guest11.j0ke.net), which is obviously running in a virtual environment (xen). It gives error 404 (file not found), but perhaps some of you, who are more computer literate than I am, can take this information and figure out a more direct (and thus more reliable?) download link.

Just try out this command:
wget --no-check-certificate --spider 83.141.20.131/sl/downloads/stresslinux_64bit_11.3.x86_64-0.6.105.iso.bz2

I hope this post didn't bring to light some information the administrator (stresslinux) wanted to conceal from the public. All this poking about would be absolutely unnecessary if there was a "normal", direct download link available that any download manager could handle and if the download server would support resuming, so that an interrupted download would not have to be started all over again. It would certainly save bandwidth, which might be the main reason for the frequent connection resets.

I am now attempting to download the 64-bit version of the ISO-image, so wish me luck...