For future reference, a great work around for your filesystem pain is to just write a tar or cpio file to raw disk. You treat it like it is a tape drive.

No question that a network can be more convenient, but it tends to be less foolproof. Transferring files to 30 machines puts 30x the strain on the network, particularly with wifi, unless you use a multicast protocol like UFTP (which adds complexity). So, for things like SCALE, I would recommend planning for the scenario where the network isn't there; treat it like a bonus if it does.

--Chris

On Mar 7, 2017 10:56 AM, "Tom King" <ka6sox@gmail.com> wrote:
we had 2+GB files and that means EXT4/NTFS for USB Drives...it was a disaster..we finally had to go out and buy a USB HD that we were able to use...it took over 2+hrs of the Class time on Sunday to pass the drive around with 30 students...

its not needed by everyone but in our case it would have helped (along with wired network...) we could have used a switch and had them come up 5 at a time had we had a server that we could have dumped those things on.

T

On Tue, Mar 7, 2017 at 10:52 AM, Ilan Rabinovitch <ilan@socallinuxexpo.org> wrote:
We have historically offered local mirrors of popular distros on network, and played tricks with DNS to ensure they were downloaded via us.

Ilan



Ilan Rabinovitch 
Conference Chair
Southern California Linux Expo

---
Ask me about sponsorship and speaking opportunities at LinuxFests.org's upcoming events:
* SeaGL  - Nov 11-12, 2016
* SCALE 15x - March 2-5, 2017 - Pasadena, CA

On Tue, Mar 7, 2017 at 6:53 AM, der.hans <Verteiler+SCaLE-planning@lufthans.com> wrote:
moin moin,

do we normally have an onsite data store that could hold materials for
talks and workshops?

This is more about discovering if we have something I don't know about (
like the schedule xml export[0] ) than a request for service.

The legal track sent out significant homework for the lawyers. They needed
to read ahead of time, so didn't really need a local cache, but it got me
thinking others might.

I also overheard some people discussing pulling down ISOs for a couple of
workshops.

[0] I think I had been told about the xml option before, but forgotten
about it.

ciao,

der.hans