Greg Newby wrote:
For example, someone will be able to "save" their ISO configuration, then return later to get *updated* files for the same eBooks. This will be particularly useful for doing things like quarterly updates of "theme" CDs or DVDs, such as Col Choat's idea of an "explorers" collection.
This will be great for the DVD team. I don't know about the users at large though. Some people (not mirrors!) are roboting our whole site once a week in search for new books. I wonder how the DVD maker will scale under similar load conditions. I was just wondering if it wasn't more realistic to use jigdo on the users side. People who burn DVDs do have a little knowledge so they could manage to install that. Jigdo advantages: no big single chunk file transfers. jigdo will get the ebook files from the ftp server and build the DVD image on the users PC. On updates the user has to transfer just the changed files not the whole DVD image. By building our own jigdo files we could round robin the ftp load to different mirrors. Jigdo disadvantages: user has to install the jigdo client. We have to somehow build a jigdo control file (but jigdo is open source, so we can figure that out.)
Where is this program supposed to run when it is ready?
On a beefy server. Right now it's on snowy.arsc.alaska.edu, and I imagine snowy will be suitable for relatively large-scale use. I hope the program will be available at other mirror sites, too. I think it will be too intensive in disk & CPU for iBiblio, but you never know... if this sounds computationally unrealistic to offer to the general reader, to you, read my work .sig below :-)
Of course, if you throw a NetApp terabyte server at the problem... You'll need a place to store all those custom DVD images until the user has retrieved them. (How to detect that? You can't rely on the user notifying you.) Retrieving DVD images has been a PITA even with fast DSL modems, so you'll have to save the images for at least a couple of days.
Dr. Gregory B. Newby, Chief Scientist, Arctic Region Supercomputing Center
That's a good idea. You will save big on your air-conditioning bill. :-) -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org