Another CTAN mirror

The backbone of the TeX world is the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network (CTAN). The single server dante.ctan.org is the core, this one and the content is maintained by the CTAN team. It provides more than 5000 TeX packages for installing and updating TeX and LaTeX. That site is mirrored by many servers around the world, distributing the network load and bringing the content closer to TeX users worldwide. This speeds up installing.

The CTAN team does a lot of very valuable work, for example handling more than a hundred uploads per month. I wanted to contribute something, so I installed a mirror site. That’s actually quite easy to do. If you maintain a public server, you could consider doing it too, especially in regions where mirrors are rare (sites with map).

I signed up to make it an of­fi­cial mir­ror. Now after one week, I think the web form where I submitted it did not work or the team is busy. On the other hand, there are already a bunch of mirrors in Germany. My server sits in a datacenter in Falkenberg, Saxonia, East Germany. So I will share this information here on the blog, and in some TeX forums I maintain.

Being a part of the CTAN network, I used the obvious address ctan.net.

You can browse it, use it as update repository or for installing TeX. I downloaded the TeX Live installer, and ran it by:

sudo ./install-tl -repository http://ctan.net/systems/texlive/tlnet

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