[axel-users] is it possible to set http header and user-agent in .axelrc file?

[Philipp Hagemeister]

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Hi Ye,

the Range header is sent by axel itself, you can and should not modify
it. This header allows fetching only a part of a file and is necessary
for download acceleration. As the Range header is just one of the
headers sent in many requests, virtually any server will ignore it if it
does not support ranged downloads, especially if it is a request for the
full file anyway. However, although f.youku.com understands the header,
they immediately block it. Given that they block command-line clients by
UA, this seems to be a desperate measure to prevent people from
downloading their content with alternative clients.

Cheers,

Philipp

Ye Xu wrote:
> Hey Philipp,
> 
> Your detailed explanation is very helpful, but I don't quite
> understand the part about
> Range header, can you be more specific, what shall I put after -H? or
> maybe for now even
> if I put this range header after -H, the server will still won't
> accecpt multiple connections download?
> and you also mentioned a bad practice, do you mean youku.com has a bad
> practice to prevent user
> from multi-instance download?
> 
> On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 18:09, Philipp Hagemeister <phihag at phihag.de> wrote:
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>> Hi Ye,
>>
>> I see you are using the trunk version anyway. I did a little bit of
>> digging, and the problem is that f.youku.com blocks the following
>> requests with a 403:
>>
>> * No user-agent or wget or axel in the user-agent. No need for a long
>> UA, -U MSIE will do and is unlikely to be ever blocked.
>> * ANY Range header, even if we request the full file. This is extremely
>> bad practice and prevents multiple parallel downloads. As I found out
>> too late (after commiting), removing this header will break parallel
>> downloading in axel. I opened a bug report[1] for this. However, because
>> this is probably even a deliberate server malfunction and could break
>> other stuff, this needs further consideration. I will make sure to test
>> that version 3.0 does not send this header.
>>
>> The other headers have no effect on the reply.
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Philipp
>>
>>
>> [1]
>> https://alioth.debian.org/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=311284&group_id=100070&atid=413085
> 


- --
Philipp Hagemeister

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