MikTeX blocking IP very quickly

Hi,
I am giving a practical course in LaTeX for students at our university
and we had some very frustrating problems. We started with a basic
installation of MikTeX and gave everyone a starting .tex file which was
then filled with content during the course.

Our problems started when everyone tried to compile a Hello World
example. Each installation of MikTeX (about 25-30 machines) tried to
download missing packages, which resulted in our IP being blocked.

With the next course, we tried to start with "Everyone please set some
random mirror as source for the package management", but we had the same
problems. Trying to get the list of possible mirrors, which should only
be one request per machine, got us thrown out. And even after almost
everyone had changed the mirror, we had the same problem - I guess when
trying to get missing packages, first some request is sent to the
central server which already blocks at something like 30 requests from
the same IP.

Does anyone have some experience with using MikTeX on multiple machines
at the same time? Or some insight into why the update server is so quick
in blocking IP addresses?
Finally, does anyone have some pointers about how to either set up a
local repository (and if that will solve the problem) or how to transfer
the packages that have been downloaded by one user to other users
(copying %APPDATA%/MikTeX did not work)?

Thanks in advance,
Viktor

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