Looking up FTP files on ARCHIE ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1991 21:40:33 PST Fr: Richard Hintz Re: What is an Archie? Archie: The McGill School of Computer Science Archive Server ______________________________________________ To access Archie, telnet to quiche.cs.mcgill.ca or 132.206.2.3 login: archie Archie: The McGill School of Computer Science Archive Server Listing Service Given the number of hosts being used as archive sites nowadays, there can be great difficulty in finding needed software in a distributed environment. You may know that the software that you need is out there, but it can sometimes be difficult to find. The School of Computer Science at McGill University has one solution to the problem - "archie". Archie is a pair of software tools: the first maintains a list of about 600 Internet ftp archive sites. Each night software executes an anonymous ftp to a subset of these sites and fetches a recursive directory listing of each, which it stores in a database. We hit about 1/30th of the list each time, so each site gets updated about once a month, hopefully balancing timely updates against unnecessary network load. The "raw" listings are stored in compressed form on quiche.cs.mcgill.ca (132.206.2.3), where they are made available via anonymous ftp in the directory ~ftp/archie/listings. The second tool is the interesting one as far as the users are concerned. It consists of a program running on a dummy user code that allows outsiders to log onto the archive server host to query the database. This is in fact the program we call Archie. Users can ask archie to search for specific name strings. For example, "prog kcl" would find all occurences of the string "kcl" and tell you which hosts have entries with this string, the size of the program, its last modification date and where it can be found on the host along with some other useful information. In this example, you could thus find those archive sites that are storing Kyoto Common Lisp. With one central database for all the archive sites we know about, archie greatly speeds the task of finding a specific program on the net. Complete anonymous ftp listings of the various sites that we keep in the database may be obtained via the 'site' command and for a list of the sites which we keep track of, see the 'list' command. Archie also maintains a 'Software Description Database' which consists of the names and descriptions of various software packages, documents and datasets that are kept on anonymous ftp archive sites all around the Internet. The 'whatis' command allows you to search this database. Send comments, bug reports etc to archie-l@cs.mcgill.ca If you have a favourite anonymous ftp site that archie doesn't seem to maintain, or if you have additions or corrections to the Software Description database, send mail to archie-admin@cs.mcgill.ca Archie was written and is maintained by Alan Emtage (bajan@cs.mcgill.ca) and Bill Heelan (wheelan@cs.mcgill.ca). Peter Deutsch (peterd@cc.mcgill.ca) provided (and continues to provide) ideas and inspiration. ==== 10 links in glossary topic