ftp revisited
| Date | 01 March 1993 |
| Pages | 202-210 |
| Published date | 01 March 1993 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb045233 |
| Author | Rick Gates |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
Exploring
the
Nets
ftp revisited
Rick
Gates
In my first column I gave some anonymous ftp tips on how to
read and use index and 'readme' files without having to leave
your ftp session. This helps you to find the file when you're
browsing an ftp site.
I'd like to spend one more column on ftp. In this one I'll
give you some tips on using a tool that will, in one sense, do
the browsing for you. It's a tool created at McGill University
in Toronto, Canada and it's called Archie. First, some back-
ground.
There are thousands upon thousands of sites around the
Net that offer software, data and documents via anonymous
ftp.
Finding just the file that you wanted used to involve E-
mailing others with questions, trying to find and then search-
ing long lists of sites posted on UseNet groups, or just shoot-
ing in the dark and browsing sites that you 'felt' might have a
good chance of having what you want.
Archie changed much of
this.
Archie consists of two parts.
The first part is invisible to most
users.
It maintains
a
database
of many hundreds of anonymous ftp sites and visits
l/30th
of
them each night. As it visits a
site,
it gets a recursive directory
listing of all the files (and their directories) there that are
available for anonymous ftp. It then uses this listing to update
its database. This insures that the information for any site in
the database is no more than a month (30 days) old.
The other part of the Archie database is what most users
will see. This part maintains a search interface to the large
database of site listings. Using the search interface allows
users to look for particular file names they are interested in.
Once you find the file you are interested in, you simply note
the hostname for the ftp site and the path where the file is
stored at that host. This is then all the information you need to
initiate an anonymous ftp session and retrieve the file.
So,
for
instance,
if you know the name of a file that you are
looking for — say, 'pkzl 10eu.exe' — then you can feed part
or
all
of this file name to the Archie search interface and it will
give you a listing of all known sites that hold that file. Let's
take a look at the Archie search interface now in the usual
section . . .
Hints and tips: searching Archie
Archie databases are located at a number of sites around the
Net. Here
is a table
of them, taken from Scott Yanoff's popular
resource:
Site Name
archie.au
archie.univie.ac.at
archie.funet.fi
archie.th-darmstadt.de
archie.kuis.kyoto-u.ac.jp
archie.sogang.ac.kr
archie.nz
archie.luth.se
archie.ncu.edu.tw
archie.doc.ic.ac.uk
archie.sura.net
archie.unl.edu
archie.ans.net
archie.rutgers.edu
IP Address
139.130.4.6
131.130.1.23
128.214.6.102
130.83.128.111
130.54.20.1
163.239.1.11
130.195.9.4
130.240.18.4
140.115.19.24
146.169.11.3
128.167.254.179
129.93.1.14
147.225.1.10
128.6.18.15
Location
(Australia)
(Austria)
(Finland)
(Germany)
(Japan)
(Korea)
(New Zealand)
(Sweden)
(TWN)
(UK/Ireland)
(USA[MD])
(USA[NE])
(USA [NY])
(USA[NJ])
(Note:
You
can
find
out how to get the
Yanoff
list by using
the finger
command:
finger yanoff@csd4.csd.uwm.edu)
Each of these sites supports
a
number of different methods
of access to the ftp databases. The most common early access
to Archie servers was via ftp. Other search methods include
local and remote clients, Gopher and E-mail. We'll look at
each of these in their turn.
Telnet
access
This is displayed in Figure 1 where we have logged into an
Archie server at archie.funet.fi
Archie databases come with a fairly complete help system,
which you can access by simply entering the word 'help' (Fig-
ure 2).
The Archie database is searched by the use of the 'prog'
command. To use this, follow the word 'prog' with a second
string that tells Archie what you are searching for.
For example, let's assume that we want to find the file
pkz110eu.exe, because we have heard from someone else on
the Net that this file contains the pkzip facility for compres-
202 The Electronic Library,
Vol.
11,
No.
3, June 1993
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