sjr@m-net.ann-arbor.mi.us (Sander J. Rabinowitz) (10/11/90)
On October 10, the Moderator wrote (in reference to COCOT labels): >I know some of you cannot access the archives easily ... and I am >reasonably certain Lang does not want to fill all the requests ... so >those of you who can get it from the archives please do so. My message applies to anyone with an MSDOS machine who has gateway access to Internet via MCI Mail (and possibly Compuserve, AT&T Mail, etc. as well) who obtains files by sending an anonymous FTP request to the mail server (MBX: BITFTP@pucc.princeton.edu). I won't repeat the method of doing this, because the Moderator already has a good tutorial on this (see TELECOM special issue, dated 7 September 1990). I have MCI Mail, and what I found that many of my file requests come out OK, but that every once in a while, I get a file that looks like this: >The following line should contain ASCII characters 0x20-0x5F: > !"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_ >begin 0600 ACCESS.CODES >M1G)O;2! 9&5L=&$N965C<RYN=W4N961U.G1E;&5C;VU 965C<RYN=W4N961UM >M($UO;B!*86X@,C(@,30Z,#0Z-#$@,3DY, I296-E:79E9#H@9G)O;2!-24Y4M > (several hundred lines deleted) This is a UUENCODED file, and it still has to be decoded before the file is readable. (My understanding now is that the Mail Server was attempting to send an 8-bit data file down a 7-bit data path, hence the UUENCODing.) If you have access to CompuServe, go into the UNIXFORUM, and in Library 13 is a file called UU.ZIP. (This is a compressed file--you need a utility called PKUNZIP to decompress it -- available on most MSDOS BBS systems.) Upon decompression, two files are created: UUENCODE.EXE and UUDECODE.EXE. You use the latter program to perform the decoding. Caveats: 1) There is hardly any documentation. 2) The output file has line feeds, but no carriage returns. 3) I cannot predict the results that can occur with any input file. Sander J. Rabinowitz | 0003829147@mcimail.com | +1 313 478 6358 Farmington Hills, Mich. | --OR-- sjr@mcimail.com | ==> 8-) <== [Moderator's Note: Thanks for this additional hint in using the Archives mail server. For the majority of our readers who are NOT directly on the Internet, ftp is unavailable. The mail server will work, but as Sander notes, the larger files are now going out uuencoded, and unless your site has the ability to uudecode, you have a problem. In addition to the files he recommends above, you can also get a comprehensive help file by writing to 'bitftp.pucc.princeton.edu' and putting the single word HELP in upper case at the left margin of the first line of text. You'll get back a file that explains how to get into all sorts of interesting archives including the one for telecom at lcs.mit.edu. PAT]