Degraded Access to Cassini RAW Images Options

[edstrick]

I have been using a website download manager for downloading newly posted Cassini (and MER images).
HTTrack Website Copier ( http://www.httrack.com/ ) checks what files you've already downloaded and doesn't re-download them, so it can grab anything new in short order without eating humongous amounts of bandwidth.

Starting about a week ago, when I try to download all filed under

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/imag.../casJPGFullS19/

(where the current orbit's raw images are being posted) I get the message:

Forbidden
You don't have permission to access /multimedia/images/raw/casJPGFullS19/ on this server.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Apache/1.3.31 Server at saturn.jpl.nasa.gov Port 80

It's easy to grab a FEW images, one at a time, from the raw image brouser on the Cassini webpage, but effectively impossible to grab more than that.

Is this a policy change?
A website configuration error?
Is there any other way to get all the new RAW images on a more-or-less daily basis without killing a mouse and getting carpal tunnel?

[Bjorn Jonsson]

ARRRGGHHH!!

I regularly do something similar, i.e. download an entire directroy once it is 'full' which happens when a sequence (e.g. S18, S19 etc.) has ended. Now I cannot access these directories directly, I get the same error.

Now it is impossible to download everything without getting repetitive strain injury .

My guess is that this is not a website configuration error .

[ljk4-1]

Has anyone asked the Cassini Web site maintainers about this problem?

[tty]

I've had somewhat similar problems in another context. I maintain a netsite with a large number of links and occasionally runs a check for dead links with Xenu.
Recently some sites (for example Proceedings of the National Academy of Science) has put in a function that locks You out if you access several files in quick succession.
The reason is frankly to keep people (like us) that use automatic downloaders from using too much bandwidth. The solution is to to find out what is the minimum allowed time between accesses and set your downloader accordingly. The download will go a lot slower but you avoid mouse cramp.

tty

[Guest_Richard Trigaux_*]

Yes there may be something like that. Webmasters don't like bots reading a whole site in a short time, as this takes bandwidth. A classical problem is with spam robots which harvest email addresses. So large professionnal sites hosted on their own servers may put limitations.

[djellison]

The ability to bulk-download, preferably as zipped-batches is something I insisted is an appropriate means for downloading PDS data when a gentleman who is doing a project of assesing use and formatting of the PDS spoke to me a few months ago

Doug

[Guest_Richard Trigaux_*]

A gentleman? Perhaps we should speak of gentlebots when software downloading bulk data are respecting some rules of "politeness" such as letting some time between two file downloads, to avoid saturating the bandwidth and hamper other users. It is in this way that most bots work, such as Googlebot.