Lots of linux distros and other popular packages have created metalinks for the distribution of their software in a way that failover and redundancy and being able to download files from multiple mirros is supported via simple xml file.
You can take a look at all the distros and packages using metalink at this website
There is a long listing of download managers which support metalinks too.
Looking at the popularity of the metalinks , IETF has approved and it is now a standard.
So I took the opportunity of converting all the mirror information(http/ftp) of Knoppix for version 7.0.5 and have created metalinks for it in both ver3 (extension .metalink) and version 4(approved by IETF as a standard) with file name extension as meta4.
With these metafiles you are limited to only your download bandwidth of your ISP as you can parallely download from multiple mirrors simultaneously and even if some fails it moves to the other in the list.
Pls be sure to read the documentation of your download manager to ensure they support Metalinks and also pls be sure to understand the metalinks which I have published have all the flavours of ISO images(English DVD/CD,German CD/DVD) so pls pay attention when you download and only select the flavor you are interested in.
I have tested that each and every mirror in my metalink file is working at this time.
Pls let me know if there are any bugs etc.Also let me know if you find this useful then I can probably make metalinks to speed up the downloads and spread the load across various mirrors with the upcoming Knoppix 7.1.0 release as well.
Pls note since the Torrent for Knoppix has multiple files in it we cannot add it as a metafile.Currently if you want parallel downloads with HTTP/FTP/BIttorrent simultaneously then the torrent should only have one file which is the ISO file which is on the http/ftp sites.
