This week, someone sent me a very large file using something called faspex. To begin with, it sent me a link to click on to download my file, but then started telling me “for best results, install a plugin”. And apparently “for best results” means “to download this file in any way”.

The “plugin” turns out to be a .sh file that you need to make executable, and then run:

sudo chmod a+x aspera-connect-2.4.7.37118-linux-32.sh
./aspera-connect-2.4.7.37118-linux-32.sh

This installs a plugin for firefox which is available when you close and restart your browser. I don’t usually use firefox but I find that usually even my enterprisey clients have heard of it and will sometimes support it! At this point, I could download the file and got a little progress window. I left the file downloading overnight.

This morning, I came into the office and looked for my file. Since Firefox insists on dumping downloads all over my home directory usually, I expected it to be there, but it wasn’t. It turns out that the aspera faspex client will download the file into /tmp on my ubuntu system (actually Linux Mint based on ubuntu 11.10). Since my /tmp gets wiped every time my machine reboots, I moved the file fairly quickly! Hopefully this helps anyone else trying to use the same combination of tools.