Re: sunsite.org.uk - rsync access to cd-images
On Thu, 19 Aug 1999, J.A. Bezemer wrote:
***CUT
Another type of solution would be a very small CD image which would
install enough so that the user could point their system at a mirror and
do an ftp install. Could be extended to 120MB zip discs etc.
This would need to be well documented.
>
> Hmmm... I think the end user's problem is disk-space. And they won't know just
> what to download -- Debian is biiig. Besides, there are no symlinks in WinXX
> so binary-all stuff is doomed to go wrong. (I'm talking about users switching
> from WinXX to Debian.) So instead of downloading the archive that they don't
> understand and that won't fit on their discs once Debian is installed, they
> download the CD images. Everyone knows how to burn a CD ;-)
>
> So if you think a bit, it's probably understandable that there are vast
> numbers of users/distributors who are downloading entire images by FTP. This
> means an enormous load on the very few CD image mirrors. If we could offer
> those people a method that lightens this load and is also faster (far more
> _package_ servers are available), they might refrain from using FTP to a
> server on the other side of the world.
>
> (Another nice thing about a CD is that you can make copies for your friends;
> you don't make copies of your harddisk. So maybe we should encourage people to
> write _Official_ CD's... ;-)
>
> > > Hm, I wonder how much effort it would be to patch rsync to take a list of
> > > extra files from which to try and find the download data. That way, we could
> > > just point rsync at the .deb's in the ftp archive, and it could pick out the
> > > data it needed, without the image build step.
> > >
> > Is there a port of rsync for win users?
>
> Just found:
> http://www.steffensiebert.de/ports/rsync.html
> and
> http://www.ozemail.com.au/~msteveb/rsync/index.html
>
> Could someone verify that they actually work? And possibly write a simple "do
> it this way" scheme like this, for the Debian webpages:
>
> 1. Get rsync from http://xxxxx/rsync.exe
> 2. Get <helperprogram> from http://xxx
> 3. Install <helperprogram> by unzipping & running setup.exe
> 4. Open a DOS window
> 5. Go to dir in which images are that should be updated
> 6. Enter "rsync --dry-run server::xxxx"
> 7. If that goes well, run "rsync server:xxxx"
>
> Of course I just made up this example, but you know what I mean. And don't
> forget Win-users are quite stupid sometimes, so you'll have to spell it out
> for them ;-)
>
>
> There's also wget for Win32 on
> http://sunsite.auc.dk/wget/index.html
>
> Could someone please verify that
>
> wget -O outputfile ftp://server/file
>
> works correctly (this is what would be needed in the pseudo-cd creation script
> -- ehh... batch file ;-)
> AFAI can see it's a simple binary and no complicated procedures are needed
> here.
Phil (the other one).
-
Philip Charles; 39a Paterson St., Abbotsford, New Zealand; +64 3 4882818
I sell GNU/Linux CDs. See http://www.copyleft.co.nz
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