Quickly - how to download a file to the ESX 3.x service console?

The VMware ESX 3.x is missing wget package so you can't use wget command to download anything from the Internet as you wish. In spite of wget, the service console provides lwp-* tools which are simple perl scripts based on LWP and URI perl modules and which allow to do some basic tasks around the HTTP protocol.

The tools are part of perl-libwww-perl package. The package is installed by default. The most important tool is lwp-download which you can use for downloading files. Let's check the steps how to download something:

1. esxcfg-firewall --allowOutgoing
   
• allow outgoing connections from service console
2. lwp-download http://dfn.dl..../apcupsd-3.14.4-1.el3.i386.rpm
   
• download apcupsd package
3. esxcfg-firewall --blockOutgoing
• return firewall to the initial state

Beside this, the perl-libwww-perl package contains other tools like lwp-mirror, lwp-request and lwp-rget. Check their man pages for their usage.