emv@ox.com (Edward Vielmetti) (12/22/90)
Archive-name: comp.archives/administrivia/welcome/1990-12-21 Archive-directory: cs.toronto.edu:/comp.archives/ [128.100.1.65] [Note: I will be on vacation until about 1 January 1991. No doubt I will miss something between now and then that should go into comp.archives. If you see something good mail it to me (with all the headers intact, please). Until then, happy new year! --Ed.] comp.archives is a newsgroup which reprints announcements of software, archive sites, and other resources which are available via anonymous FTP on the Internet. The usual way for someone to announce something new on the net is to post a description to the newsgroup for which it is most relevant. These release notes usually contain all of the information which would be relevant to someone familiar with the field to figure out whether they would like to retrieve it and where to get it from. comp.archives tries to locate these from out of the rest of the discussion and collect them all together. Back issues of comp.archives are kept in the following places: Archive-directory: cs.toronto.edu:/comp.archives/ Archive-directory: wuarchive.wustl.edu:/usenet/comp.archives/ Archive-directory: (somewhere at orst.edu, under construction) In Europe, look at Archive-directory: freja.diku.dk:/pub/comp.archives/ This is a copy of the collection at cs.toronto.edu. Since Europe's wet-piece-of-string internet connection is about as bad as Canada's, I urge caution in just randomly grabbing the whole collection from either site, cause it's pretty big. Thanks go to Mark Moraes <moraes@cs.toronto.edu>, Chris Myers <chris@wugate.wustl.edu>, Carl-Lykke Pedersen <carllp@diku.dk>, and Kim H|glund <shotokan@diku.dk> for their work. Mark Moraes keeps the reference collection at Toronto; contact him, and let me know, if you are planning to put up an archive. Figure on about 300-400K of compressed data per month plus whatever the size of the index you want to keep. There are at least two other resources that you should know about if you are interested in comp.archives. First is the anonymous FTP site list which is kept by Jon Granrose (odin@pilot.njin.net) which is available as Archive: pilot.njin.net:/pub/ftp-list/ftp.list and which is posted monthly to comp.misc, comp.sources.wanted, and (usually) to comp.archives. At 140K, this list (or the unformatted version which is "sites" in the same directory) is suitable for grepping. The other must-have tool in finding some long-lost random piece of software is the "archie" server which runs on quiche.cs.mcgill.ca. Login as "archie" and follow the instructions. This innovative project has two parts. One maps out the internet by grabbing full recursive directory listings of about 400 different sites at a rate of 20 per day; these directory listings can be retrieved in Archive-directory: quiche.cs.mcgill.ca:/archie/listings/ Then there's some code that puts this all into a database and presents a simple user interface to search through it. It's still very much in a beta stage, but I've grown to depend on it to answer simple "now where was that neuroprose archive" questions. You can also access this server by mail; send mail to "archie@cs.mcgill.edu" with the text "help" to get information, or send (e.g.) "prog neuroprose". The thing you are sending is a regular expression, so you might want to use "prog [nN]euro[pP]rose" if you weren't sure. There is another FTP site directory collection on vmd.cso.uiuc.edu, cd to "phil.513", get "afindex.tarz". This is a giant (25M) compressed tar file. If you are on a slow link don't get it, it'll be out of date before the transfer ends :-(. There are probably other good sources of information on what is out there, in various catalogs and such. I'll be trying to pull together periodic postings about topical collections, but it's slow work. If you have something which you thing should be part of this list, let me know, I'll try to make room for it. Note the address change (effective 1 Dec 1990) to "emv@ox.com" instead of "emv@math.lsa.umich.edu". --Ed Edward Vielmetti MSEN moderator, comp.archives emv@ox.com (or) archives@ox.com