gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore) (12/30/87)
rsalz@bbn.com (Rich Salz) wrote: > > (Ideally, this "server" could anonymous FTP anywhere and > > return a [uuencoded? ARCed? compressed?] UUCP message). > >Could UUNET do this? Someone? Please? > You've got a basic misunderstanding here, I think. You can only FTP among > sites on the Internet (FTP on a LAN is boring and doesn't count :-). If > you can do that, you don't need the server. Or, are you asking that the > server know all the archives everywhere, and FTP and pick up the right > software from the right source? Ouch! Who could maintain such a > database? It's an impossible task. Actually, this is doable. Any Internet site could certainly write an archive server that would accept a hostname, directory name, file type, and filename(s), and FTP those files over the Internet. I have a shell script that does this. The script could be extended to do this in an empty directory and to then tarmail whatever was received, to an email address. (Tarmail does "tar | compress | btoa" and breaks the result up into mailable chunks. It comes with compress.) The problem is that most people say "you can get this software by anonymous FTP from foo.berkeley.edu" and never really say what directory it's in, what the exact file name is, or the file format. FTP's *ability* to be interactive forces everybody who uses it to be interactive due to sloppy advertising. But if a working archive service was running, this would probably improve -- people who gave nonspecific directions would get flames or polite letters asking them to clarify, and they would learn. In the meantime we could ask the archive server to send us "ls -sRF" on that site's FTP directory, grep for what we want, then do the actual request. > Finally, we come to the big question: who pays? Sure, I suppose uunet > could bring up Brian's archive-server, but all it would take is for one > or two people -- say in Canada, California, and England... It would be easy for uunet to offer this service only to directly connected uucp sites, and they are billed monthly for uucp service. European sites that gateway through mcvax already have arrangements to split costs; if these support chargeback for large volume mail traffic, uunet could also allow access via mail starting "mcvax!". Since anyone can get a connection to uunet, this is not discriminatory. In fact uunet already offers a similar service, but with human intervention. If you send mail to uunet!postmaster asking for something that has been advertised for FTP (best to include the whole message), they will ftp it for you and queue it to be uucp'd to your site. You can't do it in the middle of the night and have the software in an hour, but it's still a good deal... -- {pyramid,ptsfa,amdahl,sun,ihnp4}!hoptoad!gnu gnu@toad.com I forsee a day when there are two kinds of C compilers: standard ones and useful ones ... just like Pascal and Fortran. Are we making progress yet? -- ASC:GUTHERY%slb-test.csnet