For the past week or so (what are a couple of 12-hour periods here or there between friends?) isoHunt has been “sick” when accessed from certain regions – but perfectly fine from others.
At the moment, users are being redirected to a tongue-in-cheek “isoHunt is Sick” page, letting them know that isoHunt’s hardware and software services wouldn’t mind a bit more attention and that, hopefully, isoHunt will be back up shortly..
The Windows Vista Recovery Disc ISO image that we published a couple of days ago has been a hugely-popular success – thank you all for your interest and your links. Unfortunately, we’ve had a lot of people (*cough* Chinese download sites *cough*) hotlinking the image directly, and as a result we’ve been forced to take certain measures.
The Windows Vista Recovery Disc is a 120 MiB download, and our bandwidth has jumped quite drastically since making it publicly available. Effective immediately, all hotlinked requests to the ISO image are being redirected to the download page, we ask you (quite humbly) to refrain from linking directly to the image file.
We haven’t done anything evil like disabling the usage of download managers or any other such nefarious actions that would bring the wrath of our beloved readers upon us though; so no worries :)
You don’t have an OC-48 or even T3 in your home. It takes you 24 hours+ to download the latest DVD image of Ubuntu or Windows Vista. Or maybe it “only” takes you 12 hours+. Either way, you’ve just finished your download to realize that its corrupt: the crc32 and md5 hashes just don’t add up. You burn it any way, only to find that it crashes randomly at some point of the install – or if you’re really unlucky, once it boots and seems to be working fine.
It’ll take you an entire extra day (and night) to re-download that copy.. and this time you’ll want to make doubly-sure you don’t disconnect in the middle or hit the power-switch by accident. Then you stumble upon this article, and realize you’ve been going about this the wrong way. Because the answer isn’t to download it again, but to only download the parts that are corrupt, the parts that you need – and nothing more.
Several independent torrent clients, most notably µTorrent and Azureus, have created “peer exchange” protocols that allow for clientless torrent downloads. By means of the now-standard DHT trackerless peer-exchange format, these clients (and others) communicate with one-another and ask for info about new peers to download from.
Long story short, they let you download torrents with dead/no trackers, and without communicating with a central server. Everyone knows the importance of trackers of course, they provide torrent clients a list of known peers to download from – leechers and seeders alike, as well as track the status of a torrent at any given time. The problem is, they disappear mighty fast.