I try out a lot of software at my place, including many Linux distribution, latest cool open source software and so on. And most of the time I depend on the internet for the same. Currently my connection is at 128 kb/sec, so a typical Linux download would range anywhere between 4-6 hours.
So in the past few months i have been thinking about a download server, yep that’s right, a server to download files.
I had a few requirements though:
- I should be able to control the download from anywhere in my home network(from any other pc)
- I should be able to stop/start the download, so that my browsing experience would not suffer
- It should be sufficiently protected – firewall is a must(i will do this part later on)
- all downloads must be saved to a common folder accessible to all members of the network
- he download manager MUST support both Linux and windows platform and preferably an open source software(Since i am first trying this out in windows first and then moving on to linux- for firewall and extra security, i need to have both platform support)
- Finally the download manager must have command line support so that i can access it remotely without much fuss.
The journey begins:
First I headed to a cool download manager comparison page from Wikipedia. First I checked out wxDownload Fast -its a very cool download manager with nice interface and supports all 3(win,mac,linux)operating systems. It had a limited command line interface, but it lacked CLI support for stop/resuming downloads
Next was aria2 – it has support for bit torrent, HTTP, HTTPS, ftp. It was basically a cli software and als UIand supports lot of Linux distros.