1919191919 1919191919 1919191919 1919191919 1919 1919 1919 1919191919 1919 1919 1919 191919191919 19191919 1919191919 19191919 191919191919 19191919 1919 1919 1919 19191919 1919 1919 1919 1919 1919 1919 1919 1919 1919 1919 1919 1919191919 1919 1919191919 1919191919 1919 1919 1919191919 1919 1919191919 1919191919 1919 1919 No 19 %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% BIO-NAUT NEWSLETTER << EDITED BY ROBERT HARPER >> %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% When I go shopping for the family I open up the local newspaper and look to see if there are any special offers. I go to shops that are conveniently near and who have the items that I want. There is nothing more frustrating to travel miles to a shop only to find out that they do not have the thing that you want in stock. As you will be well aware there are many "anonymous FTP shops" which offer a large selection of software and information for downloading. Now wouldn't it be nice to have a "local newspaper" that you could browse through and see what was on offer. You might discover some "FTP shop" close at hand that had just the item that you were looking for. Well this editon of BioBit gives you and intoduction to ARCHIE... the ultimate remedey for the ftp blues. GETTING TO THE POINT. So how do you get to use ARCHIE? If you are Internet connected, it's easy. Telnet to quiche.cs.mcgill.ca (132.206.2.3 or 132.206.51.1) and login as user "archie". "help" gets a list of valid commands. WHAT ARCHIVE SITES DOES ARCHIE KNOW ABOUT ? The "list" command allows you to specify a regular expression as an argument and prints the site names in the database which match that expression, along with the primary IP address of the site and the date that ARCHIE last updated the site for the database. "list" without an argument prints the data on all sites that ARCHIE knows about. ARCHIE SESSION WITH COMMENTS. In this session I will go through some of the basic commands just to show how the system operates. I will take a look at the following commands (SITE, LIST, PROG, MAIL, EMAIL), that should be enough to give you a taste of the possibilities. Site allows you to get directories from a well known FTP site. List helps you to find out more about ftp sites that may be in your geographical region. Prog helps you to find out where a particular programme might be kept. Mail allows you to get the results of your searches sent back to you via mail. And Email is for the fans of Bitnet who have no Internet access. $ telnet 132.206.2.3 ! Opening up the telnet session Trying... Connected to 132.206.2.3. Escape character is '^X'. Interrupt remote process character is '^C'. SunOS UNIX (quiche.CS.McGill.CA) login: archie ! Give archie as username. WELCOMING MESSAGE. ARCHIE: The McGill School of Computer Science Archive Server [12 Mar 1991] ******* Welcome to ARCHIE Version 2.0 ****** Speed and performance under load should be improved. 3 new searching methods added. See help section under "set search". Output may now be sorted. See help under "set sortby". New Software Description database to help you find the names of packages to do what you want done. See help under "whatis". New "mail" command allows you to mail ARCHIE results back to you. See help under "mail" and "set mailto". A "status" variable allows you to turn on or off search progress information. Help "set status". ** There is a problem with numbering split letters. Looking into it. ** If you want to add a site to the ARCHIE database or add/correct the Software Description Database write to archie-admin@cs.mcgill.ca. ** 'help' for help ** bug reports, etc. to archie-l@cs.mcgill.ca ** THE ARCHIE HELP SYSTEM. archie> help Help gives you information about various topics, including all the commands that are available and how to use them. Telling ARCHIE about your terminal type and size (via the "term" variable) and to use the pager (via the "pager" variable) is not necessary to use help, but provides a somewhat nicer interface. Currently, the available help topics are: about - a blurb about ARCHIE bugs - known bugs and undesirable features email - how to contact the ARCHIE email interface help - this message list - list the sites in the ARCHIE database mail - mail output to a user nopager - *** use 'unset pager' instead pager - *** use 'set pager' instead prog - search the database for a file quit - exit ARCHIE set - set a variable show - display the value of a variable site - list the files at an archive site term - *** use 'set term ...' instead unset - unset a variable whatis - search for keyword in the software description database Help topics available: about bugs email list mail nopager pager prog quit regex set show site term unset whatis HELP REGARDING SITE. Help topic? site The 'site' command allows you to get a full listing of an ftp site in the ARCHIE database. The output format is similar to that of ftp's long recursive listing. The usage is: site Example: site col.hp.com FINDING OUT ABOUT GENBANK WITH SITE COMMAND. archie> site genbank.bio.net -rw-rw-r-- 0 Apr 9 1988 .hushlogin -rwxrwxrwx 3 Oct 2 16:45 Public -> pub drwxr-xr-x 512 Aug 29 06:49 bin drwxr-xr-x 512 Oct 2 16:56 dev drwxr-xr-x 512 Feb 6 1990 etc -rwxrwxrwx 7 Oct 2 16:45 lib -> usr/lib drwxrwxr-x 512 Oct 3 19:24 pub drwxr-xr-x 512 Feb 6 1990 usr bin: ---x--x--x 131072 May 10 1990 kermit ---x--x--x 12408 Oct 16 1989 ls ---x------ 98304 May 10 1990 sh ---x--x--x 16384 Aug 29 06:49 xfersh !!!! COMMENTS !!!! ARCHIE then begins to give you a listing of all the files at the Genbank anonymous ftp site, as you can imagine this is LONG so I have edited it down to root and bin. So you can readily get a listing of all the files held at Genbank... without going to Genbank to get them. HELP REGARDING LIST. Help topic? list 'list' provides a list of the sites in the database and the time at which they were last updated. There is an optional regular expression argument to limit the list to specific sites. Note that the numerical (IP) address associated with a site name is valid at the listed time, but since they do occasionally change, it is possible that a discrepancy may occur until that site is updated in our database. Furthermore, the listed IP address is the primary, as listed in the DNS database: secondary addresses are not stored. Usage: list [] Examples: list will list all sites in the database, while list \.de$ lists all German sites. FINDING OUT ABOUT FTP SITES IN YOUR COUNTRY. When you go shopping it is usually most convenient to visit the local shop so if I were from Switzerland I could find out the Swiss FTP sites by giving the following command. Hmmmm... it looks like ARCHIE does not know about bioftp.unibas.ch. Well nothing is ever perfect. If your FTP site is not on ARCHIE and if you want to belong to the ARCHIE database then you should contact archie-admin@cs.mcgill.ca archie> list \.ch$ 4 currently stored site names match '\.ch$' iamsun.unibe.ch 130.92.64.10 23:07 7 Mar 1991 ltisun.epfl.ch 128.178.119.94 21:58 7 Mar 1991 nic.switch.ch 130.59.1.40 19:15 7 Mar 1991 siam.unibe.ch 130.92.66.11 14:17 7 Mar 1991 HELP REGARDING PROG. Site and List are rather broad spectrum commands, and they give you the big picture of what is going on in the FTP world, but very often you are only interested in locating a specific programme that you have heard a whisper about on BIO-SOFTWARE. The Prog command helps you to locate it. Help topic? prog The 'prog' command allows you to search the database for a specified pattern. The usage is: prog where the interpretation of depends on the current value of the 'search' variable. Searches may be performed in a number of different ways. See the help section on the 'search' variable for a full explanation. The output of prog can be sorted in different ways, depending on the value of the 'sortby' variable. See help for the 'sortby' variable for a full explanation. FINDING OUT WHERE A CERTAIN PROGRAMME IS KEPT. Now I know that dottyplot is kept at Huston and Indiana, and since dotty is such a nice string I can ask ARCHIE to tell me which FTP sites it is available from. ARCHIE will reply by telling you the number of hits, the host where the software is kept, and the exact location of the directory. This feature is most likey the best invention since sliced bread:-) archie> prog dotty # matches / % database searched: 5 / 96% Host genbank.bio.net (134.172.1.160) Last updated 23:33 7 Mar 1991 Location: /pub/mac FILE rw-rw-r-- 236829 Aug 2 1989 dottyplot.hqx Host menudo.uh.edu (129.7.1.6) Last updated 20:17 7 Mar 1991 Location: /pub/genbank-server/mac FILE rw-r--r-- 236829 Sep 13 20:22 dottyplot.hqx FILE rw-r--r-- 3713 Sep 13 20:22 dottyplot.read Host genbank.bio.net (134.172.1.160) Last updated 23:33 7 Mar 1991 Location: /pub/mac FILE rw-rw-r-- 2965 Oct 26 1989 dottyplot.readme Host gatekeeper.dec.com (16.1.0.2) Last updated 14:12 8 Mar 1991 Location: /micro/amiga/fish/ff001 FILE r--r--r-- 11897 Aug 17 15:17 dotty.zoo !!!!! COMMENTS !!!!!! As you can see the search comes up with 5 hits. Huston and Genbank score but Indiana is missing so it looks like Don Gilbert's server is not in the ARCHIE database. For that matter "the number one FTP site in the Galaxy" is not in the database either:-) HELP REGARDING MAIL. Now it might be that you can not capture all the information that is given out by ARCHIE... and believe me there is alot of information if you run a "site" command on your favourite FTP site. In which case there is a mail option so that the output will be return to you by mail. help topic? mail The 'mail' command has two forms: mail [,...] which causes the output of the last command to be mailed to the specified address (or comma-separated list of addresses). mail which causes the output to be sent to the address specified in the "mailto" variable. All the various Internet addressing styles are understood. BITNET sites should use the convention user@sitename.bitnet UUCP address can be specified as user@sitename.uucp THE EMAIL OPTION FOR THOSE NOT ON INTERNET. (Editor: Do you really need to put this in here) Whenever I write something about the wonders of Internet someone always comes along and asks "but how can I do that from Bitnet". Well it looks like if you have a shopping list you can send it by email to ARCHIE and then it will make some recommendations regarding where to shop, and for that you would need to use BITFTP which is frowned apon in certain circles. Anyway here is the info you would need to explore this route. I have kept this information to a minimum so that only those who are keen and adventurous will benifit from it. Help topic? email For those people who do not have direct Internet access or those who would prefer 'batching' of their requests, ARCHIE provides an email interface handling a limited subset of the interactive ARCHIE commands. The address of the interface is archie@cs.mcgill.ca To contact us humans, mail to archie-l@cs.mcgill.ca STOPPING THE ARCHIE SESSION. Simply type quit and that breaks the telnet connection and brings you back to you local machine. archie> quit Rob "Computers Rule 01001111 01001011" Harper