OpenSUSE Linux Rants

Once in awhile, it’s nice to be considerate of the other users of your network. If I have a huge file that I want to download, and I just start the download, it will take up as much of the available bandwidth as it can, usually. If there were 30 people on the network, and 5 were downloading huge files all day long, the remaining 25 people would be pretty much unable to access the network.

What if you could throttle the bandwidth of your downloads? It may take a little longer, this is true. It is a nice tool to be able to implement when necessary.

How do you throttle the download bandwidth? The command you use is called wget. The syntax of this command is as follows:

wget ––limit-rate=[byte limit per second] [url]

To download the first CD of SUSE 10.1 at 20k per second, I would run this command:

wget ––limit-rate=20000 http://mirrors.kernel.org/opensuse/distribution/SL-10.1/iso/SUSE-Linux-10.1-GM-i386-CD1.iso

What’s cool is that you could write a bash script something like the following that would download the entire SUSE Linux 10.1 distribution for you completely unattended, limiting your download speed to 20k per second with a script looking like this:

#!/bin/sh
wget ––limit-rate=20000 http://mirrors.kernel.org/opensuse/distribution/SL-10.1/iso/SUSE-Linux-10.1-GM-i386-CD1.iso
wget ––limit-rate=20000 http://mirrors.kernel.org/opensuse/distribution/SL-10.1/iso/SUSE-Linux-10.1-GM-i386-CD2.iso
wget ––limit-rate=20000 http://mirrors.kernel.org/opensuse/distribution/SL-10.1/iso/SUSE-Linux-10.1-GM-i386-CD3.iso
wget ––limit-rate=20000 http://mirrors.kernel.org/opensuse/distribution/SL-10.1/iso/SUSE-Linux-10.1-GM-i386-CD4.iso
wget ––limit-rate=20000 http://mirrors.kernel.org/opensuse/distribution/SL-10.1/iso/SUSE-Linux-10.1-GM-i386-CD5.iso

Bandwidth throttling can come in very useful when you want to be considerate of the other people using your network. Also, say you were downloading SUSE 10.1. Then, you decide that you want to browse the Internet. Unthrottled, you would already be using all of your available bandwidth for your download. Browsing the Internet would be almost impossible. If you were throttling it, however, you would have at least some of your bandwidth free for browsing.

Another of the really slick ways Linux really does it for me.