johnr@extro.ucc.su.OZ.AU (John Rosauer) (04/10/91)
Archive-name: internet/finger/aarnet-services-database/1991-04-10
Original-posting-by: johnr@extro.ucc.su.OZ.AU (John Rosauer)
Original-subject: Announcing an AARNet and Internet services database
Reposted-by: emv@msen.com (Edward Vielmetti, MSEN)
We saw a need for users to be able to access the such
documents as the "Internet Resources Guide" and the
"AARNet Resouces Guide". The design criteria were:
1. The abiliity to search, rather than just fetching the
entire document.
2. It should be available on a wide variety of machines.
We chose to implement it via "finger" as this is available
to UNIX, VMS, PCs and Macs (and probably others).
The service may be accessed by sending a finger request to
directory.su.oz.au e.g.
finger help@directory.su.oz.au
Please note that this is a pilot project, so comments would be
greatly appreciated. Also, some of the databases are related to
Sydney Uni, so may not be of general interest.
We are writing a shell interface to this finger database
and will probably write a curses and an X interface.
Below is the output from "finger help@directory.su.oz.au".
__________________________________________________________
Finger offers these additional services:
- Access to a database facility
Usage: finger <key>%<database>
<key> is usually an "egrep" regular expression and <database> can be:
aarnet - resources available on AARNet
buildings - buildings and their codes at Sydney Uni
ftp - anonymous ftp files on archive.su.OZ.AU
internet - resources available on the Internet
library - library access available via AARNet
newsgroups - find NetNews newsgroups
phone - The Sydney Uni Phone Book
postcodes - Australian Postcodes
shop - prices at the UCS shop
- Usage: finger help - this help
Usage: finger help%<database> - on a particular database facility
Usage: finger copyright - please read this copyright notice
Usage: finger egrep - a manual on egrep regular expressions
Note: When specifying patterns, please take note to escape any
characters special to your system. Spaces will usually
need escaping also.
**** These services are provided by the University Network Group, ****
**** University Computing Service, University of Sydney. ****
**** Please mail support@ucc.su.OZ.AU if you have any queries. ****
--
John Andrew Rosauer | johnr@extro.ucc.su.OZ.AU
University Computing Service, H08 | Phone: +61 2 6923497
University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia | FAX: +61 2 6606557