Slashdot Mirror

At Vassar betwen 1993 and 1997 I was teaching the occasional hypertext class in the media lab in the English department, and one of the biggest challenges was getting the students off of Broadcast (an IM-like app before AIM for Mac OS ... ehm, 7, or so) while you were lecturing.

The way we usually caught this stuff (besides walking around the room in between the tables of computers) was that invariably someone would forget to turn their sound down, and the distinctive BroadCast blurp would give it away.

On a slight tangent, we had some excellent, and very productive classes when we all jumped on either the VassarMOO, LambdaMOO, or one of the other MOOs at the time, where students were allowed to wander into other rooms to discuss... well, whatever, really. The lecture, MOO-space, or, as I said, whatever.

Me neither, but I do remember only having things like WAIS and a bunch of comic strip characters!

On the subject of old but useful internet services ... whatever happened to archie? Does anybody still use it?

Up next, Jon Katz reviews the Dr Seuss classic Fox in Socks while Taco and Hemos tackle the Encyclopedia Brown series. I understand Rob Limo has the inside scoop on the latest in the Curious George books and everyone's favorite censor Michael reports on an Archie Double Digest he got in the checkout line of a Safeway.

The archie information system is a network-based information tool offering proactive data retrieval and indexing for widely distributed collections of data. The archie Data Gathering Component automates the gathering, indexing and maintenance of information, allowing information providers to offer improved resource discovery and access to information.

The archie User Access Component allows your users to locate and access your information using a variety of interfaces and search methods.

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. Perhaps the best known application of the archie system is to maintain this Internet Archives database. The database, already available from a number of service providers across the Internet, currently contains the names of over 2,400,000 files at over 1,000 anonymous FTP archive sites. Using this database, users can rapidly locate needed files without the need to log onto dozens or even hundreds of machines. archie servers offering this database currently receive over 50,000 queries per day.

http://archie.emnet.co.uk/readme.html.

-Pete

Was this post a troll? :) I mean you are running a browser now to post and read so the immeadiate desire to use Archie has faded, right? :)

Anyway, I found something here with Google: http://archie.emnet.co.uk/

Please let me know how this pans out. I never really needed to use Archie (too much of a youngun I guess) but I remember accessing it with Mosaic.

--8<--

Unfortunately, there is still no coherent architecture for mirroring and for mirror sites to register their collections with the sites which they mirror. In fact, we lack even a common (de facto) standard for recording this replication information in a machine readable for-mat. Some progress was made on this a few years ago by the Internet Engineering Task Force s [1] working group on Internet Anonymous FTP Archives, with the creation of the so-called IAFA Templates [2]. These provided a simple machine readable format for recording per-resource or collection metadata, which could easily be created by hand or programatically. Although support for IAFA templates was integrated into some software packages, e.g. the ALIWEB search engine [3] and the ROADS resource discovery sys-tem [4] , this approach never became successful on a large scale. The World Wide Web Consortium s Resource Description Format (RDF) [5] and the Dublin Core metadata effort [6] may eventually provide a viable machine readable interchange format.

Currently, the database underlying the freshmeat.net weblog [7] is perhaps the closest thing we have to a genuine mirror registry - though it focuses almost exclusively on soft-ware packages and operating system distributions, and only offers limited mirror informa-tion. RDF is also being used in this capacity as part of rpmfind.net [8], although mirror information is very limited in this case too. The Internet Engineering Task Force s Uni-form Resource Names effort [9] is also relevant here, since it would be very useful if there were persistent and location independent names for these collections of replicated resources.

[1] http://www.ietf.org/ Internet Engineering Task Force website
[2] http://info.webcrawler.com/mak/projects/iafa/ IAFA Working Group & IAFA Templates homepage
[3] http://aliweb.emnet.co.uk/ ALIWEB website
[4] http://roads.opensource.ac.uk/ ROADS website
[5] http://www.w3.org/RDF/ World Wide Web Consortium Resource Description Format (RDF) homepage
[6] http://purl.org/dc/ Dublin Core website
[7] http://freshmeat.net/ freshmeat.net website P. Lenz & Andover Advanced Technologies, Inc.
[8] http://rpmfind.net/ rpmfind.net website
[9] RFC 1737, Functional Requirements for Uniform Resource Names K. Sollins & L. Masinter December 1994

And at the end somewhat less relevant to the topic.

This kind of metadata should be extremely valuable for implementation of the URIs and particularly for the I2C(s) (URI tp URC). Quote from the RFC 2483:

"Uniform Resource Characteristics are descriptions of resources. This request allows the client to obtain a description of the resource identified by a URI, as opposed to the resource itself or simply the resource's URLs. The description might be a bibliographic citation, a digital signature, or a revision history. This memo does not specify the content of any response to a URC request. That content is expected to vary from one server to another."

Heck, these days people might have totally forgotten about gopher **grin**. Systems come, systems go, and http is here to stay. Napster isn't...