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1992-09-19
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Archie: The McGill School of Computer Science Archive Server
Telnet QUICHE.CS.MCGILL.CA or 132.206.2.3
login: archie
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.