<<< EISNER::DUA3:[NOTES$LIBRARY]INTERNETWORKING.NOTE;1 >>> -< internetworking >- ================================================================================ Note 54.0 What? You don't have FTP? No problem No replies EISNER::TILLMAN "Brian Tillman, Smiths Industries" 149 lines 14-APR-1992 12:21 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Some site's Internet access is mail only, but there are two Internet tools that can enable FTP access to files files through the mail! The first tool is called Archie. Archie is a mail Archive server, an automatic program to which you can send mail asking for the location of files in FTP repositories on the Internet. Archie will answer with a list of all the locations where the file you want resides. Archie has five North American addresses at this time. They are: archie@archie.ans.net archie@archie.mcgill.ca (or archie@cs.mcgill.ca) archie@archie.rutgers.edu archie@archie.sura.net archie@archie.unl.edu These all supply the same service. To control Archie, you simply send it mail, making sure the message text contains one or more of the following commands: path This lets the requestor override the address that would normally be extracted from the header. If you do not hear from the archive server within, say, about two days, you might consider adding a "path" command to your request. The path describes how to mail a message from cs.mcgill.ca to your address. cs.mcgill.ca is fully connected to the Internet. help Will send you a help message describing these commands. prog [ ...] A search of the "archie" database is performed with each (a regular expression as defined by ed(1)) in turn, and any matches found are returned to the requestor. Note that multiple may be placed on one line, in which case the results will be mailed back to you in one message. If you have multiple "prog" lines, then multiple messages are supposed to be returned, one for each line, but this doesn't work as expected at the moment. Any regular expression containing spaces must be quoted with single (') or double (") quotes. ALL OTHER ed(1) rules must be followed. NOTE: The searches are CASE SENSITIVE. The ability to change this will hopefully be added soon. site | A listing of the given will be returned. The fully qualified domain name or IP address may be used. list [ ...] List all of the sites names currently stored in the database that match (a regular expression as defined by ed(1)). Multiple can be placed on one 'list' line. (Note: There maybe some problems with this while the format of the database is being reorganized. Try multiple 'list' lines if this doesn't work) The format of the resulting list is: site name, site IP address and date last updated in the archie database. whatis [ ...] Search the Software Description Database (SDD) for (case insensitive). The SDD is a text database containing the names and short descriptions of about 3500 software packages, documents and datasets available on the Internet. If you have any corrections or additions, mail them to archie-admin@cs.mcgill.ca Multiple arguments may be placed on the same 'whatis' command line. servers List all the archie server hosts worldwide manpage ["txt" | "nroff"] Send a copy of the archie manual page. Without any arguments, the preformatted ASCII manual page will be returned. This can also be specified with the "txt" argument. That is, manpage txt will return the preformatted manual page. The nroff (UNIX) manual format can be obtained by specifying the "nroff" argument. It is probably a good idea to use the compress command (on a different line) in conjunction with this request, if you have access to the UNIX compress(1) and uudecode(1) utilities. compress ALL of your files in the current mail message will be "compressed" and "uuencoded". When you receive the reply, remove everything before the "begin" line and run it through "uudecode". This will produce a .Z file. You can then run "uncompress" on this file and get the results of your request. Note: we do not currently have uudecode and uncompress. quit Nothing past this point is interpreted. This is provided so that the occasional lost soul whose signature contains a line that looks like a command can still use the server without getting a bogus response. Once you have used Archie to determine the location of the file you want, you can use the FTP Mail server (ftpmail@decwrl.dec.com) to request it. The FTP Mail server runs on a system at DEC. It accepts the following commands: reply set reply addr, since headers are usually wrong. connect [HOST [USER [PASS]]] defaults to gatekeeper.dec.com, username "anonymous", and password of your reply address. ascii files grabbed are printable ASCII. binary files grabbed are compressed, or tar, or both. chdir PLACE "get" and "ls" commands are relative to PLACE (only one CHDIR per ftpmail session). compress compress binaries using Lempel-Ziv encoding. compact compress binaries using Huffman encoding. uuencode binary files will be mailed in uuencode format. btoa binary files will be mailed in btoa format. ls (or dir) [PLACE] short (long) directory listing of PLACE. get FILE get a file and have it mailed to you. quit terminate script, ignore rest of mail message (use if you have a .signature or are a VMS Mail user. Keep in mind that requests from these servers can produce a lot of mail (big files).