ISO downloads with multiple mirrors for higher reliabilty, automatic checksum verification

[Francois Petillon]

Anthony L. Bryan wrote:
 > I can not force download managers or metalink clients to change how
 > they have been behaving for years, but I can encourage them to be
 > respectful of server resources.

You are encouraging people to misbehave :
---- http://www.metalinker.org/why.html
Metalink was designed for describing the locations of large files that 
are multi-located (shared via many mirrors and with P2P) so segments can 
be downloaded from different places at the same time, automatically.
----
Automatic load balancing distributes traffic so individual servers are 
under less strain.
----

> Can you think of some per transfer and per server options that would help
> the situation?

As far as I am concerned, either someone uses a single connection to a 
local/nearby server to download (using segmented download should be use 
only for failover), or he uses P2P.
I will quote Marco d'Itri (cf debian-devel ML last september) :
----
To summarize the issue:
  * parallel downloads are bad
  * using P2P when local mirrors are available is very bad
----

François