frechett@spot.Colorado.EDU (-=Runaway Daemon=-) (05/28/91)
I am currently working on a strange little project.. Here is my problem. I have more than 4 Megs of files and only I and the other people on my machine can look at them.. I can't put them all in a local anon ftp site. I did toy with the idea of another mail server but I wanted to make something a teeny bit different, so I did. What I have constructed.. (Alpha version only) is a server that you reach via telnet. I know this leaves out the people who are not on UNIX or some other machine with net access but I may still get the mail server running later; this is different. This is what it does right now.. You telnet to a given port of my machine and it will pop you into my server. Right now, all that it will let you do is stroll around through my archives and look at files. Currently it is very simplistic there too, as it doesn't do any paging (soon). But for just seeing what it around, it is pretty slick. I also have a huge index file that has a listing of files and short descriptions. (I plan to break this down into individual indexes for each directory but even as it is.. it is pretty organized. What I plan to do eventually, when I make sure there are no bugs in what I have now, is to allow you to look through the archives and then if you see something you like, it can be queued up for mailing to you. There are a few advantages, disadvantages and problems to this whole idea that I see. Problem: it only supports one peron on a port at once.. Advantage: ditto.. Unlike ftp, a couple people would have a hard time loading down the machine, looking at files, or queuing them up for mailing, as I would have access to the queue. Disadvantage: Leaves out all those you rely on getting stuff via mail which of course includes all those on the bbs and such. But as I said.. this is just a different approach. Advantage: Let's you look at what you are getting before you get it. Actually.. I can't think of any more right at the moment as my brain is fried right now.. but I will say this.. I have started the server up on spot.colorado.edu (128.138.129.2) on ports 4242 4243 4244 and 4245.. it would be reached with the following command.. telnet spot.colorado.edu 4242 " " 4243 etc.. All I can promise is that it will be up when it is up an down when it is down.. (for now) There might be bugs.. I don't know... I haven't run into any. VERY IMPORTANT: If you try a port and it just hangs right after it connects.. like Trying... Connected to spot.colorado.EDU. Escape character is '^]'. [hangs here] then it means someone else is using it.. There are two things that you can do.. try one of the other three ports.. OR if you just sit there it will eventually connect you if the person already on leaves.. (I can't be sure that it won't time out, haven't done long term tests yet); Any bug reports can go to me at frechett@spot.colorado.edu or you can put them in the bugfile via the server.. Let me know what you think of the whole mess.. thank you Oh and it is written in perl so any advise from perl hackers/gurus would be great. ian -=Runaway Daemon=- P.S. It is REAL new so don't bash on me if it isn't all that you expected but constructive comments are great..