Finally got my broadband connection. An interesting experience; spent 20 minutes fiddling with it, and failing to get a connection before I gave up and phoned the support. They were alright — the modem drivers needed re-installing and the windows config needed doing manually. Two days later, I got a Linksys ADSL Modem/Wireless router. Ironically, I managed to get up and working in five minutes.

My file splitting scripts didn’t work initially. The problem is that Unison uses temporary file names while copying and this includes directories. So if you transfer a single directory containing 2G, for example, Unison will use a temporary directory till it has the whole lot. So I tried rsync instead; this worked well up to a point — about 2.4G as it happens, where a bug causes it to block.

Finally, I worked out how to get Unison to work — firstly, I run it with

ignore = Name {*.*}

This matches all the files (and not directories by and large). So the directory structure gets transferred. Then, I run Unison again; now it transfers the files so you get a restart with the granularity of a file. For really large files, I can still use my split file scripts.

Having said this, I am getting very variable download rates from the ADSL — 1.5Mbs and more at night, but during the day rarely more than 500K. To be expected, I supposed.

Originally published on my old blog site.