Make VMWare Downloads Go Fast

VMWare software downloads come from a Really Weird CDN. It's not very good. It caches, and the fill from the upstream servers is really slow. Here in New Zealand, if the software image is not in the cache - if it's new, or if it's not super popular - it goes at several Mbps.

I've set up a proxy server in Oregon to help with this. It only accepts connections for vmware.com and only HTTPS.

Example:
curl --proxy vmware.networks.fail:3128 -o <filename> https://xxxx.vmware.com/blah

Get the URL from the download page.
The filename can be whatever you want, but you probably want it to match the VMWare one. Remove the < and > symbols.

Cheers.
Nathan Ward

ps. I did this while bored waiting for Juniper software to download, and decided to copy it for VMWare as they are Special too.