Re: [Pan-users] Error Correction

[Douglas Bollinger]

On Wed, 18 Jun 2003 13:50:58 +0100
address@hidden wrote:

> Yesterday I was kinda "flipping through" freshmeat and found the
> following site:
> 
>       http://freshmeat.net/projects/parchive/
> 
> Description is as follows:
> 
>       Parchive is a tool to apply the data-recovery capability concepts of
>       RAID-like systems to the posting and recovery of multi-part archives on
>       Usenet.
> 
> Just wondering, does PAN have any built-in error-correction code, for
> those "just-in-case" cases?

Hmmm, I'm not sure what you mean.

In certain binary groups that specialize in _really_ big files, like 700
meg AVI files, the posters usually use rar file compression, which breaks
the file into many chunks (with a little compression) and make a few parity
files as well.  The parity files are "magic" files than can reconstruct any
of the missing rar file chunks at a one to one ratio (one parity file per
missing rar chunk).  This way if a file is dropped along the way, which
happens frequently, you can use a parity file to replace the dropped file
without bugging the poster for a fill all the time.  I don't think you have
to use par with rar, but this is the way it is usually done.

I'm not sure what this has to do with Pan.  Right now, you d/l the file
chunks with Pan and run rar/par by hand which is fine by me.  With the size
of these files, I don't think this process would automate very well.

-- 
You can't hurt me!!  I have an ASSUMABLE MORTGAGE!!