> Had
> the file been split and a checksum computed for each piece, I could have
> grabbed only the affected portion of the ISO.
This is screaming for an FTP server mod similar to the wuftpd code that will
automatically run tar|gzip. That is, given a file "foo", serve "foo.aa" to be
the first (server-defined) chunk size of the file. Define "foo.md5" to be a
(precomputed) list of md5 checksums for each chunk. The ftp server
automatically just open's and seeks in the single file and returns the proper
amount of bytes.
Result: server only stores 1 copy (the whole, large file), the clients can grab
either the whole or the parts.
For instance,
ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/4.0-RELEASE/bin/bin.tgz might be
served with a chunk size of 235Kb.
BTW, other than the checksums, it is possible for an ftp client to grab
arbitrarily sized chunks of a file using the FTP "RESTart" option. I don't know
of a client that supports this, but it would be easy to add.
John
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