Hi-ho, Just following on a bit from my comments about dial-up being a better idea for cheap large scale downloads... Here's a bit of a copy'n'paste from the logs on my 'server' machine. Just to show I'm silly enough to practice what I preach. (Silly because I've got access to a fast internet pipe at work)
pppd[15560]: Connection terminated. pppd[15560]: Connect time 1440.5 minutes. pppd[15560]: Sent 14906088 bytes, received 424378048 bytes. pppd[15560]: Exit. diald[4540]: Link died on remote end. The 1440.5 minutes represents the 24hour timeout Xtra impose, and in that time I got 424Mb before the line dropped. Average of 4.9k/s over 24hours. And I just did an 'at' with a 'wget -c' to continue the file download where it left off (wget didn't recover from the dropout, which it normally does..) Not as fast as adsl by a long shot, but a damn site cheaper, and I'll have the file I want it about another 5 hours... :-). Not a good idea if you only have one phone line though, and you really need a dedicated machine with a good quality modem to hang on the line that long. 424Mb would represent the entire allocation for some DSL plans, and I'd be paying 20c a meg from now on.. That'd be crazy, as I've got my eye on another 2 or 3 Gig before the end of the month. Cheers, Chris H.
