peterd@opus.cs.mcgill.ca (Peter Deutsch) (10/09/90)
In article <3187@ucsfcca.ucsf.edu>, dick@cca.ucsf.edu (Dick Karpinski) writes: [* plug for free Software Foundation, etc deleted *] > . . . . . (Where is that site that keeps > a directory of anonymous ftp sites and what they have?) That's us here at SOCS (School of Computer Science, McGill University). the service is known as "archie" and resides on quiche.cs.mcgill.ca [132.206.3.30]. archie is an "archive server server", that is, it keeps an up-to-date list of archive sites and what is stored at each one. We are now maintaining a set of about 900 sites, each updated at least once a month. Internet users can login to quiche and search through the listings for strings, thus hopefully locating the software you're after more quickly than going through whatever archive sites you actually know about (I bet there are not many of you who actually know of 900 archive sites! :-) To access archie, telnet or rlogin to quiche.cs.mcgill.ca as user "archie". You will get a message screen containing info about archie's latest status and the available commands (we keep trying to find ten minutes here and there to spruce it up a bit). Currently, you can do the equivalent of ed regular expression searches or ask for the contents of an entire archive site listing. Planned soon are the ability to look for archive site names (ie "whois *orst*.edu") and the ability to limit searches to certain archive sites (eg "prog smalltalk *.fi" or "prog smalltalk *.edu"). We also want to build a better database and associated search mechanism, add an email interface and maybe a GUI interface as well (the last is a tangent related to my thesis work on distributed information systems). We have been talking with a number of other sites who are interested in providing a simmilar service and we'd like to see a few archies around the world. Perhaps a couple in Europe, a few across North America, etc. What we'd like to avoid is having hundreds of sites running the same software, flooding the archive sites with update requests. Still, if you're interested in getting on the archie mailing list, write to Alan Emtage (bajan@cs.mcgill.ca) as he's the principal implemetor right now. Finally,don 't forget that ed regular expressions aren't exactly csh regular expressions. this has bitten a few people. Sorry if this is not exactly NeXT related, but I believe we have all the NeXT archive sites in the set. Of course, I'm writing this on a NeXT. :-) - peterd ^X ^I .signature ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ +-------+ Peter Deutsch McGill University | u # u | peterd@cs.mcgill.ca School of Computer Science |/\/\/\/| | a a | "Well she turned me into a newt!" \ a / "A newt?" \___/ "I got better." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------