[tex-live] So far.....expensive failure

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 2013-02-15 at 16:30:49 +0100, Markus Kohm wrote:

 > I have 6Mbit ADSL and network installation takes less than an hour
 > É

This means (theoretically) that on a 100 Mbit/s LAN, 16.667 users can
install TeX Live within less than an hour.  Not very impressive at a
first glance, but if most people install TL from a USB stick and only
a few use the network interface, performance is quite reasonable.

As I told Denis already, providing a local TeX Live mirror is an
option, at least.  Some people can install from a local mirror while
others are installing from USB sticks.  All what matters is that
things can be done in parallel, so that not too much time is wasted
for the installation.

What's also worthwhile to investigate is whether tftp can be used in
order to broadcast TeX Live to all machines at once.

I've once seen tftp in action.  There are Linux courses at Hannover
University.  It's desired that participants play with Linux and
probably break things.

In order to allow people to break Linux installations, each user gets
a fresh Linux installation.  Users have to boot their system with a
particular option and a fresh Linux system is sent to all machines by
tftp using the broadcast interface.  It doesn't matter how many
machines are involved.

I'm wondering whether it's possible to broadcast TeX Live to many
machines at once as well. 

Regards,
  Reinhard

-- 
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Reinhard Kotucha                                      Phone: +49-511-3373112
Marschnerstr. 25
D-30167 Hannover                              mailto:reinhard.kotucha at web.de
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