USQB015@LIVERPOOL.AC.UK (Mark Powell) (04/10/89)
A few PD servers for ST software follow. I just recently found these and
thought netters may be interested in them (US people can probably ignore
all of this. It's in England where we never get told anything).
Send the following sites a subject-less mail message containing the word
"help", simple really. You should (bounce, bounce, bounce) get back a nice
help message telling you all the other commands that these servers understand.
I hope you can convert these addresses for your system's mailer.
server@uk.ac.brad.marvin JANET
archive-server@ssyx.ucsc.edu ?
A little more complicated, but none-the-less useful are the mailing lists
provided by the network of LISTSERVers. These lists usually maintain an
archive of files. The ST on is PROG-A16. These servers can also be sent a
help command in just the same way as the above two servers, although
subscribing to groups like INFO-A16 can be a little less straightforward.
All the LISTSERVers are networked so if you mail to the wrong server your
message will be automatically forwarded, for you, to the correct site (nice).
There are about 50 of these servers (I think/know), but as I said you can mail
to any. For Europe probably begin with DEARN or possibly FINHUTC as these will
be pretty close to you and for the US (mmmmm let me guess) maybe RPICICGE is
a nice site (for reasons I may explain in a second or two depending on your
reading speed or baud rate). i.e. mail
listserv@earn.dearn
listserv@earn.finhutc
listserv@earn.rpicicge
All of these servers (and all of the other servers on the net) have a standard
set of commands which can be discovered by sending a help command to one of
these. Also servers also have local commands, however, these aren't generally
of much interest. One site that has local commands of particular interest
is RPICICGE which maintains the SIMTEL20 archives. This server supports
commands such as /PDDIR, /PDGET to obtain a directory listing and a file
respectively. Try sending the following to LISTSERV@EARN.RPICICGE
/PDDIR PD1:<*>
This will give you a top level directory. Then maybe you could try listing
every file and directory in the MISC top level directory i.e.
/PDDIR PD1:<MISC.*>*.* 9999
The 9999 means files less than 9999 days old, if you leave this off you
only get 30 or less day old files. You can get a file with.
/PDGET PD1:<MISC.MINIX>MINIX.INTRO (Quite an interesting file if you're
interested in things like that!)
Other than the SIMTEL20 archives these servers maintain distribution
lists such as INFO-A16, ATARST-L, PROG-A16 and many others. (I did get
a full list of all the distribution lists, but I can't remember how. So
you'll have to experiment to get one.) These can be subscribed to by
sub <list> <name> e.g.
sub info-a16 Mark Powell
The server that you mail this to will forward it to the nearest server
that maintains the list you want to subsribe to. The INFO-A16 is basically
the COMP.SYS.ATARI-ST USENET newsgroup, mailed to people without USENET
access. PROG-A16 has ST PD software on it. And as yet I have recieved
no mail from ATARST-L, but it is listed as "Atari ST discussions".
You can get a list of all software on PROG-A16 by mailing
index prog-a16
To a server.
I hope all of this has been useful to someone. If you have any queries
then you can e-mail me for some help.
Mark Powell
ARPANet : USQB015%IBM.LIVERPOOL.AC.UK@{UCL-CS.ARPA,CS.UCL.AC.UK}
JANET : USQB015@UK.AC.LIVERPOOL.IBM
USENET : MCVAX!UKC!IBM.LIVERPOOL.AC.UK!USQB015