I’ve always been partial to Prozilla, as a useful Linux download manager, since it’s multithreaded, and does file resume pretty well.

Then, it sort of became “out of debian tree” due to licensing or some such, and I switched to “axel” which is a pretty decent multithreaded downloader too.

I’ve now switched to LFTP, since it allows me to mirror http/ftp directories with a single command, which is my typical use case. Here you are mister downloadmanager: “an url” — now fetch!

LFTP however doesn’t multithread by default: It requires some magic;

set pget:default-n 5
set mirror:use-pget-n 5

Add these lines to ~/.lftprc or enter them at the lftp: ~> prompt.

Why aren’t these defaults?

WIOCC Chief Operating Officer Ryan Sher told MyBroadband that a cable cut on SMW3 in the red sea occurred yesterday which is to blame for EASSy service disruptions.

It is the single thing that has broken copiously, and caused the most downtime since since South Africa got loads of undersea capacity via Seacom, and EASSY.

So, after yet *another* firewall HDD failure, I ended up with systemrescuecd booted from a USB stick on my firewall, because I just needed something to run an FS repair with.

Yeah I was silly, I should have gotten the debian-live rescue CD, and followed my own instructions to recover and just “gotten it on with”, but you know how these things go.

So, systemrescuecd didn’t really help in the end, and the fucking HDD was blown to shit as usual, so cue another reinstallation.

Except I thought “well, I’ve got this linux running now already, from sysrescuecd, lets install Debian, from Linux” right ? I mean… “_How_ hard can it be ?”

Well, I really liked my old debootstrap method, but sysrescuecd is Gentoo based, and thus I had to start fiddling with “emerge”.  Well, emerge sucks, and after half updating it’s cache, it had eaten all the ramdisk that was available on the live-cd, and thus everything from there was “FAIL”…

So I simply wget’ed the deboostrap package and moved on from there

wget http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/d/debootstrap/debootstrap_1.0.26+squeeze1_all.deb
ar -x debootstrap_1.0.26+squeeze1_all.deb
tar xvfz data.tar.gz
DEBOOTSTRAP_DIR=./usr/share/debootstrap/ ./usr/sbin/debootstrap --arch amd64 squeeze /mnt http://debian.mirror.ac.za/debian


Then follow the rest of the instructions from my old instructions and get a shiny new debian, replacing “lenny” with “squeeze”, or whatever blows your hair back.