6.0677 R: Network Information: Finding Addresses (1/74)
Elaine Brennan (EDITORS@BROWNVM.BITNET)
Thu, 15 Apr 1993 14:58:51 EDT
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 6, No. 0677. Thursday, 15 Apr 1993.
Date: Thu, 15 Apr 1993 21:16:26 +0300 (EET-DST)
From: LBJUDY@VMSA.TECHNION.AC.IL (Judy Koren)
Subject: RE: 6.0668 Qs: E-Word lists; French; Mice; Judas; Sweden (5/113)
Re. Roger Hardy's plea for network info (I hope the editors will
agree with me that it's reasonable to send this to the whole list
not just Roger...):
1) recently announced: a file at mailbase.ac.uk that is supposed
to give updated information on the state of our friendly
network info. providers (Archie, Gopher, WAIS, WWW, etc.):
ftp to mailbase.ac.uk, cd pub/nir, file is called nir.status.report
and is about 8K *lines*.
Disclaimer: I haven't got around to checking this out yet, it's
on my List of Things To Do (which is also about 8K lines :-) )
As far as my handwriting will let me see, that really is niR
and not a typo for nic as you've probably been thinking...
2) Anyone who's got a PC with an Ethernet card can ftp a gopher
client and bypass the local gurus if necessary. I think the Mother
of All Gophers, Minnesota U., even tells you how to get it.
(Philological/historical note: Minn.U. isn't the biggest gopher
around any more, just the First and Original, ie "mother" in
the pre-Sadam Hussein meaning.) Telnet to consultant.micro.umn.edu
and login: gopher (yes, I know "consultant" is a funny name for
something cute, furry and useful, I didn't name it...). If they
don't tell you anything, ftp to the same place and nose around.
Failing all else, ftp to our ftp site, ftp.technion.ac.il, and
there's the U.Minn. PC gopher client in the directory /supported
or one of its subdirectories (our CC splits things into "Programs
we support" and "everything else"; /unsupported is a simtel
mirror but *please* don't overload us, the whole darn computer
is unsupported-er than it should be. You have quite a few simtel
mirror sites your side of the Atlantic...) It's a .zip file;
PKUnzip is also in the /supported directory. Gopher has a reasonable
.doc file.
3) WAIS: I don't know of a *nice* PC WAIS client. If anyone does,
please tell! But SunSite has the nicest vt100 client I've seen:
telnet to SunSite.unc.edu, login swais. (The advantage of nice
vt100 clients is that you can do this from home with Kermit.)
4) Archie: I don't know of a PC Archie client 'cos pretty well
everyone runs Archie on some Unix or even VMS machine or other.
In the bad old days (a year or so ago) we used to telnet to
archie.funet.fi, and there are about 5 U.S. public-access Archie
sites. Another fun idea is to access Archie through a gopher:
SunSite has Archie and WAIS on their gopher (same computer as
3), login gopher; the beast's actual name is OGPHRE, clearly
it's an anacronymic animal; also one of the most useful); but
IMHO if you want WAIS, login swais rather than accessing via
the gopher, that WAIS client is really neat.
5) WWW: clients are available by ftp to info.cern.ch (the
Mother of the WWW), dir. pub/WWW/bin and then subdirectory according
to machine; within these subdirs, the file WWW is a line-oriented
client, Viola and Erwise are X-Windows; I'm not sure if there's
a decent PC one; last time I checked, the only nice client was
Viola and I don't have an X-Windows terminal so I'm still waiting
(re-checking is on my List of Things To Do). Personally, if I
have to choose between a line-oriented WWW client and gopher, give
me gopher every time.
Again, if your computer center people are persuadable, why not let
them put clients on a big university computer; better still, why
not servers for the services? (but that takes upkeep so I can understand
why they might not want to; also takes loads of disk space.) BUT if
you're on your own, you can run your own clients provided you have
an Ethernet card. Nobody has yet come up with a Gopher, WAIS etc.
client that will run on a PC and emulate a terminal so that you can
gopher out via a modem/phone lines from home. Not as far as I know,
anyway.
Hope that helps; if I forgot something, ask again :-)
Judy Koren, The Technion library system, Haifa.