> Thanks for your answer, i do not have any problem. i just think the mechanism i described behind download.o.o is not know enough, so that people tend to advice each other “better” mirrors or tend to advice others mirrors to “ease the charge of the main one”.

Yes, this is what’s still in the heads of many people.

> Is download.o.o capable to accept all these downloads ?

Totally, it is not even under load.

> i often read that choosing others mirrors will give me a quicker download, can i assume this is not true anymore ? Or never has been true maybe.
> It looks like you’d definitely advise download.o.o as the best choice (but in some special cases you described above ).

Yes.

In the distant past, there was one master download server, and everybody was
advised to *not* use it. Everybody had to search for mirrors instead. Mirror
lists were maintained by hand.

Today, the mirrors are known by the master, and you simply let it assign you a
mirror. Indeed you can expect that it makes a reasonable choice for you.

However, one thing has not changed: a mirror that’s assigned could be broken at
the very time, could suffer an attack or abuse, and it could become painfully
slow or unavailable. This can happen at any time and it means that you need to
try another mirror.
But there usually is, when you download something from the Internet, no
“feedback loop” which notifies the server whether your download was successful
in the end. The server can’t help you with dealing with the situation, except
that it can “try again” when *you* try again. Well, this is truly a general
problem that affects all download clients, browsers, servers alike.

If you wonder, if it wouldn’t be easy to make the client tell the server that a
mirror didn’t work – no, it’s not; first, no standard client (the webbrowser
you use) does do it, and even if they did, it’d be difficult to distinguish
problems that affect only the user from problems that really are with the mirror.
It’d be hard to get useful data from it.

The solution to this exists today, and is available to you. It’s just not well
known. I’ll describe it in the following.

(Sidenote: there may be other potential solutions you can think of, but for our
demands it is a must that a solution be highly scalable, stateless, play well
with proxies.)

The principal solution is twofold. The responsibility of the server
(download.opensuse.org) is to provide “knowledge”. The responsibility of the
client (your download program) is to *use* this knowledge.

In detail: download.opensuse.org can provide information about all potential
download sources right away, and send checksums along which allow for
verification of the download. With this information, the client has all it
needs to be sure to successfully complete the download without ever having to
query the server again for additional information. It also means the client can
work fully automated without prompting the user for anything – until the
download is done. Note, you don’t even have to manually check MD5 sums, like in
the past. It’s already done by the client.

This technology is called “Metalink“.

The download program (the Metalink client) automatically tries other mirrors, if
one doesn’t work, or if is too slow. The client verifies the checksum of each
downloaded part, and automatically re-fetches broken segments from another
mirror. This will guarantee that you get the correct file even if several
mirrors had an outdated or broken file by accident.

Therefore, I heartly recommend to use a Metalink client when downloading openSUSE.
It’ll give you a happy download. It’s worth it.
Yes, it’s not an utopy – it’s there :)

If you use Firefox, install this Firefox extension.
If you are a commandline junkey, there is aria2c (packages)
Check http://metalinker.org/ for more clients.
Our wiki has instructions: http://en.opensuse.org/Metalink

Ask your browser vendor for native metalink support.

The same technology could be leveraged for YaST/zypper. Your life will be a lot
easier once YaST/zypper can sensibely deal with network and mirror failures.
This is still an utopy — although a working prototype exists, thanks to
Google, who allowed a GSoC student to work on it. See
http://en.opensuse.org/Libzypp/Failover for more information about this and the
Status quo.

All i use for OSS, non-OSS, and updates. Fast, reliable, down right killer. Used to use mirrors.kernel.org, but found the initial contact to be slow, and sometimes not up-to-date.

Not so unique. I am using Fedora’s mirror manager to mirror non-Fedora content. So is Dell.

“(The administrative interface could probably be grafted onto our database. It’s just that nobody has looked into that. Feel free to work on it)”

You work on it if you need it. I don’t. I was merely pointing out that one already exists that you could use or else reinvent the wheel. Not so new for Novell anyway.