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Comment by Tmmrn | Hacker News Reader

  LinuxVirtualBox.part1.sfx
  LinuxVirtualBox.part2.rar
  LinuxVirtualBox.part3.rar
  LinuxVirtualBox.part4.rar
  LinuxVirtualBox.part5.rar

Why? Why the proprietary rar format? I mean, is there any reason to actually use rar over even "only" xz nowadays or for big downloads, zpaq (lrzip is probably not mainstream enough I guess)? And 1000 megabyte parts? Why?

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Hi Tmmrn. I work on the team that made these available. We originally had these as >3Gb single files and had many requests to reduce the file sizes from people who had failed transfers. It also helps when using sneaker net to setup test environments that are isolated and you need USB sticks to move bits around.

We went with RAR because: * It's available on all platforms * No client or 3rd party software needed to extract when using self extracting SFX and EXEs respectively * some degree of built in resiliency and self correction

Hope you find them useful. Open to suggestions for improvement too. Follow the team @IEDevChat for updates and feedback.

My suggestion: use 7-zip

Open Source, available on all the major platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac OSX). You can find also the MSI version that can be deployed via Active Directory GPO

http://www.7-zip.org/download.html

Oh, and you can create self-extracting file too (even though I don't know if you can unpack them on other platforms, never tried, but I should bet you can do it)

Plus, WinRAR can extract these just fine.

It's silly to recommend a program when complaining about a format. But yes it would be better if they used zip, which also happens to be integrated in Windows Explorer.

.7z is a format too, and 7-zip supports that and other common formats like zip and rar.

afaik the plain .zip doesn't support multi-part archives and that's what they needed due to the file size. by citing 7-zip (site) I was of course suggesting the .7z file format that is opensource and there are softwares and libraries freely available.

http://www.ehow.com/how_6943340_extract-split-zip-files.html would suggest otherwise, though I can't try it myself at the moment.

  > … 7z file format that is opensource …

.ZIP is in the public domain ;)

Alternatively, this is a perfect use case for a torrent.

It always boggles the mind how the big players seem to be avoiding this download scheme like the plague even though it's unrivalled for these kinds of downloads, especially when there's a rush on the files like you'll no doubt notice in the next 10 days or so.

Most corporations block torrents. I would get roasted alive if I installed bittorrent at work.

Most large corporations, but for the freelancers and folks working for small business, a .torrent would be a godsend as an option. Especially if done with something like S3's torrent support, which lets Amazon function as the always-there seeder.

Glad you are here. Thank you so much for doing this. Just wanted to let you know that I found out about this via a twitter sponsored tweet. So whoever decided to do that as a marketing idea probably is getting their money's worth.

Looks like someone from Microsoft has some old warez scene habits.

Well there are two types of young nerds - those who use open source and those who use cracked commercial software. It's only natural that the first type doesn't usually end employed by MS.

Although they come from Microsoft, I don't feel enormously comfortable doing this:

    chmod +x LinuxVirtualBox.part1.sfx; ./LinuxVirtualBox.part1.sfx

Especially because they're not downloaded over HTTPS...

And aren't signed.

The URLs look like HTTPS to me?

curl -O "https://az412801.vo.msecnd.net/vhd/IEKitV1_Final/VMWare_Fusi...

I was assuming the built-in NSA access was making people uncomfortable. ;)

Naah, only good people get to rise to the top of the US politics. They would never abuse your data.

Why not be comfortable with it? Unless, of course, you are one of those who have something to hide. ;-)

Welcome to the 8mil people club!

for a lot of self extracting files, take a look at p7zip. It'll usually work on most of them, including some of the funky windows installers.

It's also great to pull data off a cd image without mounting, it.

I'd think you could un-rar them manually.

Yes you can. I just tested with unrar.

When I do as above. I got: "bash: ./IE8.WinXP.For.LinuxVirtualBox.sfx: No such file or directory" What can I do?

A while back (some time in the last year), they had a few of the files zipped up. There were a lot of support requests for help unzipping it. The files had a >4GiB file inside, requiring zip64 extensions. I remember at the time, my out of the box version of unzip on OS X did not support zip64 extensions - I think 6.0 is when support is added.

I'm not arguing for rar in particular, just commenting on the difficulties I saw and experienced when using the zip files they provided at one point.

I remember this problem too (I was reading http://twitter.com/reybango at this time). It was when they first launched modern.ie. If I remember correctly, there was also a problem with the initial XP image that led to it being pulled.

> Why? Why the proprietary rar format?

They want all the assurances that come from software with a corporate face attached to it. They wouldn't subject their users to software made by amateur hobbyists.

And why bother splitting up large files when most clients can resume partial HTTP requests?

Well... Fat32 FSs don't support files > 2GB

But yeah, it's silly.

Somehow, I imagine they are not hosting these off FAT32 filesystems.

Maybe it's IIS that isn't very good with partial HTTP requests... ;-)

FAT32 is common on portable storage (SD cards, USB 'thumb' drives), especially when cross-platform support is a concern.

I understand that FAT32 has a role in portable storage. What I fail to understand is the relation between USB drives and serving VM images.

Sneakernet moving of files to non-network connected devices.

And how common would that use case be when we are talking about virtual machines used in web development?

Very common

Copying a 4GB file through a congested wi-fi connection may be very slow

It's easier and faster to copy to a good USB drive

Or, uh, use cat6.

Seems like a perfect case for distributing with bit-torrent, but I suppose I should not be surprised that they aren't.

This was annoying. Thankfully you run the .sfx file and it stitches all the rars into a single vm. I too would love to know the reasoning.

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