I'm thinking about writing something in Perl and need some advice, especially if someone has already done something similar.

At work we have a satellite link to the internet, at 128/64 Kb/s (downlink/uplink). Hooked on to that are a whole load of computers.

Mostly this works fine, but if somebody decides to download a big file it slows internet access down for everyone.

I want to set up a download service on our Linux server that will allow users to queue downloads. The files will then be downloaded when the link is less busy (evening or nighttime) and the user will be notified by email when the file is ready to collect.

Does anyone know if something like this already exists?

If not I'm planning to write it in Perl. I can use LDAP to authenticate our users and SNMP to find out (from our router) how busy the link is.

One thing I'm missing is a module that will do HTTP and FTP downloads and let me adjust the bandwidth after the download has started. cUrl will let me set bandwidth, but won't let me adjust it later.

Any suggestions?

Kevin O'Rourke

In reply to Background downloading service by kevin_i_orourke

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