Earlier this week I had the opportunity to sit in on a workshop at MIT where
students were taught how to use git-annex as part of a stack of tools for
reproducible scientific data research. That was great!

One thing we noticed there is, it can be hard to distribute files to such a
class; downloading them individually wastes network bandwidth. Today, I
added [[git annex multicast|git-annex-multicast]] which uses `uftp`
to multicast files to other clones of a repository on a LAN.
An "easy" 500 lines of code and 7 hour job.

There is encryption and authentication, but the key management for this
turned out to be simple, since the public key fingerprints can be stored on
the git-annex branch, and easily synced around that way. So, I expect
this should be not hard to use in a classroom setting such as the one
I was in earlier this week.