I was trying to download Fedora Core (ISO image) the other day when I noticed an interesting phenomena - most of the mirror sites were offering 3 or 4 CD version, and very few of them DVD version. I don't see how installing from several CDs can be easier, but I digress. This made finding the DVD ISO image a bit harder, but not impossible - few of the mirror sites had it.

When I started downloading, I noticed something really strange - first, I accidentally started downloading from IE directly (which I normally don't do because IE does not support resumed downloads and always uses one connection only, unlike specialized apps that open up to 10 thread simultaneously speeding up download tremendously). IE reported that file size I am downloading is -1 (!?!) and filled the progress bar completely. Ahem.

Then I switched to FlashGet, which would always report some crazy error or give up.

Then I tried using Windows Commander. Then FileZilla and some other randomly picked freeware FTP.

Finally, I noticed something strange - when the apps would not complain, the size of the image would appear to be somewhat smaller than it should be. Few seconds later armed with a calculator I found that the size reported was exactly 2GB. Coincidentally, that is exactly the maximum you can store in the signed integer (sigh).

Who is to blame? Well, not my apps if that's what you're thinking :). The place I was trying to download from mandates a proxy which is almost three years old (Squid 2.4STABLE6). When I tried downloading without the proxy, everything was fine.

Funny how we are still occasionally plagued by overflow problems...