Mason Loring Bliss <mason@acheron.middleboro.ma.us> wrote:

>On Mon, Jun 28, 1999 at 06:46:36PM -0500, Bob Nestor wrote:
>
>> On a side note, I'm not sure how useful it is to have the ISO images 
>> available for download on the FTP Server.  It's only practical for those 
>> with hi-speed access and use of a CD Writer since dial-up users (even at 
>> 56k) would take forever to download even one image.
>
>Well... I see two things that make it seem worthwhile to me:
>
Sorry if it sounded like I was against the idea, I'm not.  In fact I'm 
actually in favor of it, but I think I understand some of the problems 
associated with it too.

>1) Folks are going to download that much anyway, just as seperate files.
>
True, but if their connection goes down (as dial-ups do) they haven't 
lost that much. They can restart with the file that didn't complete. With 
an ISO image file that means starting all over again.  At 56k a full ISO 
image can take up to 72 hours to download, assuming your ISP can provide 
a pretty steady stream which many can't.

I seem to remember that FreeBSD stopped posting their ISO images because 
of the excessive Server loads caused by people trying to download them 
over slow links.  Having 200 connections running at 33.6/56K that last 
for 3+ days each certainly doesn't help the user with a T1 who only needs 
one connection for about 10 minutes. ;-)

>2) This will make it dramatically easier for folks who want to either sell
>NetBSD CDs or give them away or whatever. The WWW list has had at least a
>couple requests for images, one of them today.
>
It makes it a little easier, but there's not much to it in the first 
place.  Creating an ISO image file that can be burned with cdrecord on 
NetBSD, Toast on MacOS, or CD Creator on Windows isn't that difficult.  
If you have the disk space and the connection speed all you need is to 
sup the files and create the ISO image.  Getting the parameters right for 
mkhybrid/mkisofs might take a little time - unless you have access to the 
scripts that Ross used for the USENIX CD or the ones people like me use.

>Your kind offer of a script that automates this stuff will no doubt be
>pretty helpful if having ISO images becomes official policy. Thanks. :)

No problem.  Does someone want to make them into some sort of package?  
Last time this subject came up I offered the scripts I used with 1.3x 
along with a small documentation file, but there weren't very many 
takers.  My documentation hasn't been updated, but the script file has 
been totally rewritten for the 1.4 Release files, and it does have a few 
internal comments.

-bob