A way to provide anonymous download URLs

Question

I run a software download site and we are trying to find a good way to present downloads to students. Due to license restrictions, there are a large number of downloads that can only be accessed by some students or staff, and many of them are dvd iso files or other large files. We started by clicking all downloads using the code, but we found that files larger than 500 megabytes in size would just exit the game and die halfway. (I think part of this problem is using afs for the storage system instead of cifs, but I won’t go into it ...)

What I was looking for is to provide users with a temporary url for a file that only works for x minutes. I had seen this before on other sites, but I was not sure what was involved in setting it up.

So, firstly, is this an acceptable solution for my scenario? Or will we still have problems? And what is the best method for doing this? Thanks!

Answer 1

Something you could do is randomly create a row in the database that matches the file and do some redirecting to the file. This parameter will be passed as part of the query string and will allow you to invalidate the URLs as you like, performing any checks before sending the file.

Answer 2

Well, since you did not mention the IIS version, you can take a look at

http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/389/configuring-ftp-with-net-membership-authentication/

This article explains how to configure an FTP server to authenticate membership in ASP.NET. If you install this, you can restrict role-based files.

Also, I doubt how you could implement an anonymous URL solution without loading it through code.