wmartin@brl-tgr.ARPA (Will Martin ) (10/29/84)
Greetings! I'm the host administrator for a non-USENET UNIX machine on the MILNET called ALMSA-1. As "host administrator", I handle the administrative side of running the machine, like being the contact point for the users (I'm not responsible for the technical or operating systems side of things). Anyway, being a MILNET host, all our users are registered with the ARPANET Network Information Center (NIC). As people leave, are added, or change data, we have to provide the NIC with update information. What I was hoping to find is one or more other UNIX machines out there who are also on the ARPANET or MILNET, and who have developed some form of automated tool package to facilitate these update actions. The NIC will happily provide us with an extract of their database, listing their records of all our users; however, this has always been in a nice human-readable format, with each "record" occupying a dozen lines or so of a straight text file, and with each line labelled. Their update process is set up to take this same format as input, so we make changes to this info and send it back to them in a message. However, doing this with an editor gets rather tedious, and the UNIX editors we are used to are not set up to write out a defined chunk of the file being edited and append it on the output file (as we would need to gradually build a file of update transactions to mail off to the NIC). This human-readable format isn't suited to most UNIX automated tools (I have written the NIC asking them if they can provide extracts in other formats), so I am wondering if anyone out there has already devised tools to process this NIC-supplied data. Any advice or experience would be welcomed. Regards, Will Martin USENET: seismo!brl-bmd!wmartin or ARPA/MILNET: wmartin@almsa-1.ARPA
james@umcp-cs.UUCP (James O'Toole) (10/31/84)
Bill, I take care of the NIC registration business for our machine(s), and when I first had to start dealing with those "User Registration Templates" I wrote myself a few handy programs. I didn't bother writing one that parses what the NIC provides me with, since generally the user registration data flows in the local --> NIC direction. I do have good programs for helping users register themselves locally (the administrator examines all data by hand before forwarding to NIC), and for generating the templates properly. I doubt that net.sources is the most convenient way to provide my sources to arpa/milnet hosts...but I'll put my code together for anonymous ftp and leave it on host MARYLAND.ARPA. I'll send you details about ftping the files soon, or leave them on BRL-VGR for you if that's more convenient. --Jim P.S. Anyone else interested in obtaining this code...contact me.