[tex-live] TeX Live on usb drive

[Robin Fairbairns]

George N. White III <gnwiii at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 1:50 PM, Robin Fairbairns
> <Robin.Fairbairns at cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> 
> > Philip TAYLOR <Philip-and-LeKhanh at Royal-Tunbridge-Wells.Org> wrote:
> >
> >> Ignoring Robin's petulant little outburst (below),
> >
> > ha bloody ha ha.
> >
> > my department pays for data transferred out of tex.ac.uk; i can't afford
> > to encourage everyone in the world who can't drive wget to flock to my
> > site, or my site will be shut down in perpetuity.
> 
> It is a bit of a pain when different CTAN sites have different capabilities --
> you end up with user A advising user B to do something that works for
> the mirror site used by A but not the one used by B.

i know of no mirror that offers on-the-fly archiving.  since i've
switched it off here in cambridge, none of the root sites do, either.

> The other issue is more intelligent redirection to steer users away from
> sites that have higher usage costs.   I think most people do try to follow
> the advice to use non-root sites, but it does make sense for root
> sites to run only the features used by non-root mirrors.
> 
> It might be interesting to look at the ratio between the bytes served to
> CTAN non-root mirrors and the bytes served to users.

fwiw, cambridge served something in the region of 2tbytes last month (a
bit under 2.5tbytes in january).  the other two root sites ship rather
less: i *really* can't afford[*] to encourage any more traffic, and (as
today) take steps to discourage it if the need arises.

robin

[*] as in, the department doesn't want to spend it...