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From: Ken Bigelow <kbigelow@www.play-hookey.com>
Newsgroups: demon.ip.support,demon.tech.unix,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Batch FTP and Web Pages
Date: Sat, 29 Jun 1996 19:49:11 -0700
Organization: Erols Internet Services
Lines: 56
Message-ID: <31D5EB27.6C97@www.play-hookey.com>
References: <31D4AA3A.BC0@www.play-hookey.com> <836073421snz@dsl.co.uk> <4r4oup$o76@newsgate.duke.edu>
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Charles Reese wrote:
>
> Brian {Hamilton Kelly} <bhk@dsl.co.uk> wrote:
> >In article <31D4AA3A.BC0@www.play-hookey.com>
> > kbigelow@www.play-hookey.com "Ken Bigelow" writes:
> >
> >> If you have a connection limited to 200 b/s, why not make the connection, start
> >> the download, and then go to bed? Most dialers (Trumpet Winsock, the user
> >> program in FreeBSD, etc.) can have an inactivity timeout so that the connection
> >> will shut down 5 minutes (or whatever) after the transfer ends, so connect
> >> time should not be a problem.
> >
> >In amongst all the grossly overlong lines above (whatever happened to the
> >Usenet convention of writing no more than 72--76 characters per line?)
> >it's easy to see that Ken lives in a world where the connection time is
> >of limited or zero cost. Here in the UK, all telephone calls are charged
> >for: even at the cheapest rate, the charge is still 1p/minute, and for
> >other times of the day, and for non-local calls (many users do not have
> >ISPs such as Demon, who provide local call access throughout an entire
> >kingdom), the charge can be as great at 10p/min. At those rates, leaving
> >a connection to plod along at 200B/s is *not* a realistic option.
> >
> >--
> >Brian {Hamilton Kelly} bhk@dsl.co.uk
I don't know who strung my lines together; I unstrung them manually, however.
Now: granted that I have my own site, with a 24-hr connection to my ISP, I still
think you're overlooking a key point I was trying to make. If all your connections
are (shudder) 200 b/s, what does it matter whether you get a 2 MB document in one
piece or in 200 pieces? If anything, your total connect time will *increase* if you
split up the job, simply because you must take the time to establish a connection to
the host each and every time you access it.
On the other hand, if your connections are of variable speed depending on general
load, why not pick the most efficient time for your purposes? If that is 2:00 AM, so
be it. You could, for example, preset Netscape or most other major browsers to load
the page of specific interest (see the Options menu, and pick General Preferences)
when it starts. Then, write a shell script to start Xwindow, PPP, and Netscape, and
have your cron daemon start it at the appropriate time.
>
> I'm jumping in here in the middle so the point may have already been
> disscussed but one way to handle big http binaries (which I also
> dislike) is to do a shell login to your provider and use a text based
> browser (I use lynx) to download the file to your shell account and then
> ftp it home from there. Of course if you don't have shell access...
>
A very good point. I've seen that done, but haven't needed to, myself. Or, without
shell access, you could use lynx from your own computer in the manner I described
above for Netscape. Just feed in the complete URL of the document you want as a
parameter to lynx. You also wouldn't need Xwindow.
Ken