Establishing a new LaTeX repository in the university

Question

Since there is only one TeX server in Australia, I am thinking to initiate negotiations with my institution to host a TeX repository on the website of University.

First of all, please give me some hints/clues on how should I convince the university for this. In the other words, what is the advantages for university to host such a repository?

Also, I am interested to know what is the actual figures for such TeX repositories? For example:

• How much physical space is required (i.e.15GB)?
• How many times a year should TeX repositories get updated by new versions of TeX packages?
• Time, resources, staff required for maintenance of the repository
• How much data is downloaded from TeX repository per day/month?

Answer 1

If you become an official CTAN mirror:

1. How much physical space is required (i.e.15GB)?

   32GB (2013: between 20GB and 30GB).

2. How many times a year should TeX repositories get updated by new versions of TeX packages?

   Once a day.

3. Time, resources, staff required for maintenance of the repository

   One day to install, configure, initialize and test your server (BSD* or Linux + Apache + Cron job to perform automatic mirroring operation).

   One minute per day to verify the automatic mirroring operation.

4. How much data is downloaded from TeX repository per day/month?

   Depending on the number of users and the bandwidth of your server (my public mirror in 2016: between 1500GB and 2500GB per month).

Example of cron job (FreeBSD):

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use warnings;
my $server = "rsync.dante.ctan.org";
my $local_copy = "/var/ctan-mirror";
my @rsync_comm =  (
           "/usr/local/bin/rsync",
           "-a",
           "--delete",
           "--no-motd",
           "--stats",
           "rsync://$server/CTAN/",
           $local_copy,
          );

my $date = localtime();
print "$date: Starting CT(eX)AN synchronisation...\n";
my $status = system @rsync_comm;
if ($status != 0) {
  print "WARNING !!!\n";
  if ($? == -1) {
    print "failed to execute: $!\n";
  } elsif ($? & 127) {
    printf "child died with signal %d, %s coredump\n",
      ($? & 127),  ($? & 128) ? 'with' : 'without';
  } else {
    printf "child exited with value %d\n", $? >> 8;
  }
}
$date = localtime();
printf "fix permissions...\n";
system("/usr/bin/find '$local_copy' -type f -perm +0111 -ls -exec chmod 644 {} \\; | wc -l");
print "$date: Ending CT(eX)AN synchronisation...\n";

Example of Apache (2.2) configuration:

<VirtualHost *:80>

  ServerName ctan.example.com
  DocumentRoot /var/ctan-mirror

  <Directory "/var/ctan-mirror">
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
    IndexOptions FancyIndexing NameWidth=* VersionSort HTMLTable
    IndexOptions Charset=UTF-8 SuppressIcon SuppressRules

    AllowOverride None
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
  </Directory>

</VirtualHost>