Thrashing your networks download with dispatch and axel

Say you need to grab a file as fast as possible and you also happen to have a few network connections knocking about. For example maybe a separate network for your wireless and ethernet. Maybe you have a phone with tethering or a 3g dongle. This little guide will get your download distributed across these connections and hopefully significantly speed things up.

Beforehand you'll need npm, dispatch and axel download manager.

Connect all of your network connections and get the IPs they have been allocated. I had some virtualbox connections appear as valid so make sure dispatch is using the right ones. You can actually use dispatch itself to list all potential connections.

dispatch list

Run dispatch with those IPs

dispatch start — http 192.168.111.68 192.168.111.223

Configure axel to use dispatch

~/.axelrc

http_proxy=http://localhost:8080

Download something

axel http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/7.2.0/amd64/iso-cd/debian-7.2.0-amd64-netinst.iso

Now axel should download across all of your devices but using multiple connections and a single file thread, so no slow file concatenation at the end.