[comp.archives] DB:ADD SITE panarea.usc.edu

crum@lipari.usc.edu (Gary L. Crum) (11/02/88)

To: bill@twwells.UUCP (T. William Wells), and users of map archive

Subject: submission to comp.archives

Please read my comments following the entry.  The archive was formerly
on tethys.usc.edu, and before that on wasatch.utah.edu.  I bought a
cute little 80M drive ($500) for things like the archive, so it will
probably be stable for at least 4 years now.  If my solid modeling lab
gets a NeXT computer as I expect, space will not be a problem.  I could
keep the archive on 256M optical platters (not always available), and
service requests on demand.  For the price I paid for the 80M drive the
archive could be (500/50)*(256M) = over 2.5G bytes in capacity, but offline
(and much easier to maintain than magnetic tapes because of access time).

@ADD SITE
NM panarea.usc.edu
EN crum@cse.usc.edu (Gary L. Crum) Tue Nov  1 19:42:40 PST 1988
AD crum@cse.usc.edu (Gary L. Crum)
MA CS Dept SAL-200; University of Southern California; LA, CA 90089-0782
CO ftp;ftp;panarea.usc.edu;128.125.3.54;/pub/map
DE
DE Archive for "maps."
DE
DE Intended for geographic information, started with Digital Elevation Model
DE (terrain) data from USGS.  Maps in other formats and even remotely related
DE models of geometrical objects are welcome.
DE

@END

[I made one slight changes: I added a blank line after the add
entry. The format has a blank line so that things like sed can
terminate on that line instead of having to go through hoops to
preserve the control line of the next entry. tww]

To the comp.archives administrator:  Please keep it simple -- at least
allow a short (casual) form of archive registration for FTP sites.
Host name, maintainer, one line description of contents, and approximate
disk space available might be enough.  I think that for an index of archives,
the number of sites is more important that the detail of description.

Here is the contents of the README file I put in the archive:

---
Map Archive
README file written Tue Nov  1 19:42:40 PST 1988 by crum@panarea.usc.edu

An Internet archive for maps of geographic-scale maps has been set up,
starting with data from the United States Geological Survey (USGS)
National Cartographic Information Center (NCIC), specifically a map
of terrain in USGS Digital Elevation Model (DEM) format.

The archive is on host panarea.usc.edu [128.125.3.54], in anonymous FTP
directory pub/map.  Gary Crum <crum@cse.usc.edu> is maintainer.

The pub/map directory is writeable by anonymous ftp.  Approximately 50M
bytes are available for the map archive as of this writing.  Send mail
to the maintainer, crum@cse.usc.edu, to update the INDEX file.
A convention is that formats be described in README-format files.
---

Gary

bill@twwells.uucp (T. William Wells) (11/04/88)

In article <8811020443.AA07112@lipari.usc.edu> crum@lipari.usc.edu (Gary L. Crum) writes:
: To the comp.archives administrator:  Please keep it simple -- at least
: allow a short (casual) form of archive registration for FTP sites.

As far as I am concerned, only the site registration is necessary.
Your registration is just fine. Particularly when the site
specializes as you do. In that case, a description of what you
specialize in, in the DE lines, is all that is needed in order
to make your information useful.

However, I'd not like less than what you provided, as that would make
life more difficult for the person trying to see what you have and
how to get it.

:                                        I think that for an index of archives,
: the number of sites is more important that the detail of description.

You are right, so long as there is enough information that the
database is useful.

: The pub/map directory is writeable by anonymous ftp.

Isn't that dangerous?

---
Bill
{uunet|novavax}!proxftl!twwells!bill