Surya Pratap wrote:
if you are really going to download the whole stuff then *http://www.debian.org/CD/jigdo-cd/ *might be good place to start
"Getting Debian ISOs has always been a painful, slow and supremely inefficient process. Jigdo is a tool for distributing and obtaining Debian ISOs in an easy, fast and very efficient manner. This HOWTO describes why you should use jigdo, a little bit about how it works and how you use it to get and update Debian ISOs." http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Debian-Jigdo/
Thanks for the jigdo link. That should be *the* solution for downloading extremely large files. I had installed and tried bit-torrent but it required others to access my system too. Since all traffic originating from outside is blocked by my firewall, it did not work out well. Jigdo is just like any other download manager.