Wildcat Files 2/The Wildcat Files 2 (Arsenal Computer).ISO/netmail/wc-uucp.txt

Text File | 1994-04-02 | 19KB | 366 lines

                             Wildcat! and UUCP
                           -----------------


INTRODUCTION:
   Before continuing, you may want to skip down to the Terminology
   section, so you can understand some of the common terms that
   will be used within this text.

WHAT IS REQUIRED TO CONNECT TO A UUCP FEEDSITE:
   The first thing you will need is a program that will allow you
   to network your PC to a UUCP feedsite.  There are various
   programs that will allow you to do this.  The most common ones
   will take a UUCP mail packet in and convert it into a Fidonet
   mail packet, Then after you have converted the packet into a
   Fido mail packet you will use another program that will toss
   the mail into Wildcat message databases.  Here are some of the
   more popular Shareware/PD packages available today:

    FRED19N7.ZIP     FredGate   UUCP<->Fido      Michael Butler
    WM301-1.ZIP  \
    WM301-2.ZIP   >  WildMail   Fido<->WildCat!  Joe Martin
    WM301-3.ZIP  /
    WAF165.ARJ       Waffle     UUCP Frontend    Tomas Dell

WHERE TO FIND THESE FILES:
   All of these files can be found on the HQ BBS.  If you have
   trouble locating a file, try performing a keyword search for
   UUCP and FIDO, as versions are subject to change.  You may also
   be able to locate these file on an online information service,
   such as CompuServe.  Alternatively, you can contact the product
   manufacturers as follows:

   FredMail :
       You can contact Michael Butler at the following network
       addresses:
       Internet : [e-mail]     FIDONet  : 3:712/515.0
       REGISTRATION COST: Commercial only.  Contact author.

   WildMail :
       Online Computer Resources can be contacted at:
       Online Computer Resources
       2036 Columbus Parkway #450
       Benicia, CA  94510
       [phone] Voice
       REGISTRATION COST: $65.00, plus shipping and handling.

   Waffle   :
       Thomas E. Dell can be contacted by writing:
       Thomas E. Dell
       PO Box 4436
       Mountainview, CA  94040
       REGISTRATION COST: $30.00 personal/public BBS use.  $120.00
        commercial use.

HOW TO CONNECT TO UUCP:
   After you have downloaded and installed FredGate, WildMail, and
   Waffle you must locate a UUCP feed site.  There are many ways
   of getting connected to a UUCP feedsite.  Some of the most
   common are commercial UUCP sites, such as Holonet, which charge
   a flat fee or an hourly rate.  Some universities may allow you
   to get a UUCP feed from them.

HOW DO I CONTACT THESE COMPANIES:
   HoloNet may be contacted at [phone] or [phone].
   Other companies offering UUCP feeds include UUNet and PSI.
   However, at the time of publication, no information was
   available regarding these services.

COMMONLY ASKED QUESTIONS:
  Q:   Can I FTP with UUCP or WildCat?
  A:   NO.  FTP is a unix to unix site transfer method utilizing
       TCP/IP as its protocol.  The two systems must be physically
       connected to the Internet itself.  Using one of the many
       services on the Internet, you can send e-mail requesting a
       file.  If the file can be located, it will be sent back to
       you as e-mail in a text format called UUENCODE.  To convert
       the text file into a binary file, you will need a program
       called UUDECODE.

  Q:   Can I TELNET with Wildcat using UUCP?
  A:   NO. Telnet is a Internet site to site protocol using
       TCP/IP.


TERMINOLOGY:
  UUCP:
   (Unix to Unix Copy Program) An application program developed in
   the mid 1970s for version 7 UNIX that allows one UNIX
   timesharing system to copy files to or form another UNIX
   timesharing system over a single (usually dialup) link. Because
   UUCP is the basis for electronic mail transfer in UNIX, the
   term is oftem used loosely to refer to UNIX mail transfer.

  INTERNET:
   Physically, a collection of packet switching networks
   interconnected by gateways along with protocols that allow them
   to function logically as a single, large, virtual network. When
   written in upper case, Internet refers specifically to the
   connected Internet and the TCP/IP protocol it uses.

  USENET:
   Usenet is a large collection of computers that are
   interconnected by the world wide network known as the internet.
   Usenet is the message network for the internet, And there are
   currently about 5000 newsgroups on usenet.

  NEWGROUPS:
   A message conference on Usenet.

  TCP/IP:
   (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) The TCP/IP
   standard transport level protocol that provides the reliable,
   full duplex, stream service on which many application protocols
   depend.  The entire protocol suite is often referred to as
   TCP/IP because TCP and IP are the two most fundamental
   protocols.

  TELNET:
   The TCP/IP standard protocol for remote terminal connection
   service.  Telnet allows user at one site to interact with a
   remote timesharing system at another site as if the users's
   terminal was connected directly to the remote machine.  That
   is, the user invokes a Telnet application program that connects
   to a remote machine, prompts for a login id and password, and
   then passes keystrokes from the users terminal to the remote
   machine and displays output from the remote machine on the
   users terminal.

  ETHERNET:
   A popular local area network technology.  An Ethernet itself is
   a passive coaxial cable; the interconnections contain all
   active components. Ethernet is a best-effort delivery system
   that uses CSMA/CD technology, And is capable of speeds of 10
   Mbps.  Ethernet is also referred to as Thinnet or Cheapnet.

  MBPS:
   (Millions of Bits Per Second) A measure of the rate of data
   transmission.

  FTP:
   (File Transfer Protocol) The TCP/IP standard, high-level
   protocol for transferring files from one machine to another.
   Usually implemented as application level program, FTP uses the
   TELNET and TCP protocols.  The server side requires a client to
   supply a login identifier and password before it will honor
   requests.  FTP is an internet site to site transfer protocol in
   real time.  The systems must be physically connected to the
   internet.

HISTORY:
   Usenet came into being in late 1979, shortly after the release
   of V7 Unix with UUCP.  Two Duke University grad students in
   North Carolina, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, thought of hooking
   computers together to exchange information with the Unix
   community.  Steve Bellovin, a grad student at the University of
   North Carolina, put together the first version of the news
   software using shell scripts and installed it on the first two
   sites: "unc" and "duke." At the beginning of 1980 the network
   consisted of those two sites and "phs" (another machine at
   Duke), and was described at the January Usenix conference.
   Steve Bellovin later rewrote the scripts into C programs, but
   they were never released beyond "unc" and "duke." Shortly
   thereafter, Steve Daniel did another implementation in C for
   public distribution.  Tom Truscott made further modifications,
   and this became the "A" news release.

   In 1981 at U. C. Berkeley, grad student Mark Horton and high
   school student Matt Glickman rewrote the news software to add
   functionality and to cope with the ever increasing volume of
   news -- "A" news was intended for only a few articles per group
   per day.  This rewrite was the "B" news version.  The first
   public release was version 2.1 in 1982; the 1.* versions were
   all beta test.  As the net grew, the news software was expanded
   and modified.  The last version maintained and released
   primarily by Mark was 2.10.1.

   Rick Adams, at the Center for Seismic Studies, took over
   coordination of the maintenance and enhancement of the news
   software with the 2.10.2 release in 1984.  By this time, the
   increasing volume of news was becoming a concern, and the
   mechanism for moderated groups was added to the software at
   2.10.2.  Moderated groups were inspired by ARPA mailing lists
   and experience with other bulletin board systems.  In late
   1986, version 2.11 of news was released, including a number of
   changes to support a new naming structure for newsgroups,
   enhanced batching and compression,  enhanced ihave/sendme
   control messages, and other features.

   The current release of news is 2.11, patchlevel 19.  Article
   format is specified in RFC 1036, last revised in December 1987
   (a version is distributed with the news software).
       {An aside about RFCs:  a RFC is a Request For Comment,
       a de-facto standard in the Internet Community.  It is a
       form of published software standard, done through the
       Network Information Center (NIC) at SRI.  Copies of
       RFCs are often posted to the net and obtainable
       from archive sites.}

   A new version of news, becoming known as "C" news, has been
   developed at the University of Toronto by Geoff Collyer and
   Henry Spencer.  This version is a rewrite of the lowest levels
   of news to increase article processing speed, decrease article
   expiration processing and improve the reliability of the news
   system through better locking, etc.  The package was released
   to the net in the autumn of 1987.  For more information, see
   the paper "News Need Not Be Slow," published in The Winter 1987
   Usenix Technical Conference proceedings.

   ANU-NEWS is news package written by Geoff Huston of Australia
   for VMS systems.  ANU-NEWS is complete news system that allows
   reading, posting, direct replies, moderated newsgroups, etc.
   in a fashion closely related to regular news.  The
   implementation includes the RFC1036 news propagation algorithms
   and integrated use of the NNTP protocols (see below) to support
   remote news servers, implemented as a VAX/VMS Decnet object.  A
   RFC977 server implemented as a Decnet object is also included.
   The ANU-NEWS interface is similar to standard DEC screen
   oriented systems.  The license for the software is free, and
   there are no restrictions on the re-distribution.  For more
   info, contact [e-mail] (Geoff Huston).  ANU-NEWS is
   available for FTP from kuhub.cc.ukans.edu.  Contact
   [e-mail] for more info.

   Several popular screen-oriented news reading interfaces have
   been developed in the last few years to replace the traditional
   "readnews" interface.  The first of these was "vnews" and it
   was written by Kenneth Almquist.  "vnews" provides a
   "readnews"-like command interface, but displays articles using
   direct screen positioning.  It appears to have been inspired,
   to some extent, by the "notes" system (described below).

   "vnews" is currently distributed with the standard 2.11 news
   source.

   A second, more versatile interface, "rn", was developed by
   Larry Wall now of JPL/NASA and released in 1984.  This
   interface also uses full-screen display with direct
   positioning, but it includes many other useful features and is
   very popular with many regular net readers. The interface
   includes reading, discarding, and/or processing of articles
   based on user-definable patterns, the ability to follow
   "threads of discussions" in newsgroups, and the ability of the
   user to develop customized macros for display and keyboard
   interaction.  "rn" is currently at release 4.3, patchlevel 53,
   with a major re-release under development; release 4.4 is
   expected at the end of January 1991.  "rn" is not provided with
   the standard news software release, but is very widely
   available due to its popularity.

   xrn is an X11-based interface to NNTP that was written by Rick
   Spickelmier and Ellen Sentovich (UC Berkeley).  The current
   version is 6.9.  xrn supports many features, including sorting
   by subject, user-settable key bindings, graceful handling of
   NNTP server crashes, and many of the features of rn (including
   KILL files and key bindings similar to rn).  xrn is actively
   supported by the authors with bug fixing and feature addition
   support from many of the users.  xrn can be retrieved from most
   of the popular FTP sites (gatekeeper.dec.com, uunet.uu.net,
   expo.lcs.mit.edu) and is on the X11R4 distribution from MIT (in
   the contrib section).

   There are two popular macro packages named "GNUS" and "Gnews"
   that can be used with the GNU Emacs text editor.  These allow
   reading, replying, and posting interaction with the news from
   inside the Emacs text editor.  Client code exists to get the
   articles using NNTP rather than from a local disk.  Copies can
   be found on most archive sites that carry the GNU archives.

   "nn" is yet another reader interface, developed by Kim F. Storm
   of Denmark and released in 1989. nn differs from the
   traditional readnews and vnews by presenting a menu of article
   subject and sender-name lines, allowing you to preselect
   articles to read. nn is also a very fast newsreader, as it
   keeps a database of article headers on-line (I.e. it trades
   space for time. A good rule of thumb is that the nn database
   size is 5%-10% of your news spool. So up to 110% of your news
   spool is the amount of space news and the nn database will
   take).  The current version of nn is 6.4.11. nn can be obtained
   via anonymous FTP from dkuug.dk, uop.uop.edu,
   mthvax.cs.miami.edu or various other sites; European sites
   should request the sources from their nearest backbone site.
   Other options can be found by reading news.software.nn.

   "notes" is a software package popular at some sites.  It uses a
   different internal organization of articles, and a different
   interchange format than that of the standard Usenet software.
   It was inspired by the notesfiles available in the PLATO system
   and was developed independently from the Usenet news.
   Eventually, the "notes" network and Usenet were joined via
   gateways doing (sometimes imperfect) protocol translation. The
   interface for "notes" is similar to "rn" but implements
   different features, many of which are dictated by its internal
   organization.  "notes" was written in 1980-1981 by Ray Essick
   and Rob Kolstad, (then) grad students at the University of
   Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  The first public release of
   "notes" was at the January 1982 Usenix conference.  The current
   release of notes is version 1.7.

   In March 1986 a package was released implementing news
   transmission, posting, and reading using the Network News
   Transfer Protocol (NNTP) (as specified in RFC 977).  This
   protocol allows hosts to exchange articles via TCP/IP
   connections rather than using the traditional uucp.  It also
   permits users to read and post news (using a modified version
   of "rn" or other user agents) from machines which cannot or
   choose not to install the USENET news software.  Reading and
   posting are done using TCP/IP messages to a server host which
   does run the USENET software.  Sites which have many
   workstations like the Sun and Apollo products find this a
   convenient way to allow workstation users to read news without
   having to store articles on each system.  Many of the Usenet
   hosts that are also on the Internet exchange news articles
   using NNTP because the load impact of NNTP is much lower than
   uucp (and NNTP ensures much faster propagation).

   NNTP grew out of independent work in 1984-1985 by Brian Kantor
   at U.C. San Diego and Phil Lapsley at U. C. Berkeley.  It is
   now in release 1.5.11, with the next planned release at 1.6.
   NNTP includes support for System V UNIX with Excelan Ethernet
   cards and DECNET under Ultrix.  NNTP was developed at U. C.
   Berkeley by Phil Lapsley with help from Erik Fair, Steven
   Grady, and Mike Meyer, among others.  The NNTP package is
   distributed on the 4.3BSD release tape (although that is
   version 1.2a and out-of-date) and is also available from the
   various authors, many major hosts, and by anonymous FTP from
   lib.tmc.edu, mthvax.cs.miami.edu and uunet.uu.net Reader NNTP
   clients for VMS are also available, including VMS/VNEWS
   (current release 1.3-4.1) and an upcoming reader only version
   of ANU-NEWS. VMS/VNEWS is available from [e-mail].
   Although the current release of ANU-NEWS is useable as a reader
   it can be difficult when used with a UNIX server.

   An NNTP newsreader for Macintoshs is available called
   HyperNews. It is implemented as a HyperCard stack and depends
   on MacTCP. It is available from many Mac archives, including
   apple.com and sumex-aim.stanford.edu There is also an
   NNTP-based netnews reader for Symbolics Lisp Machines (under
   Genera 7) available for anonymous FTP from ucbvax.berkeley.edu
   [128.32.133.1] in pub/nntp-clients/lispm written by Ian
   Connolly <[e-mail]> and maintained by
   Richard Welty <[e-mail]>.  In addition, another
   NNTP-based news browser is available running under Genera 7 and
   Genera 8.  It provides mouse driven hierarchic browsing of
   newsgroups and articles, with support for X11 servers on remote
   machines.  It is available for anonymous FTP on
   flash.bellcore.com [128.96.32.20] in the directory
   pub/lispm/news-reader/.  It is written and maintained by Peter
   Clitherow <[e-mail]>

   A TOPS-20 reader was developed by Dave Edwards of SRI
   <[e-mail]>, but current availability is unknown. An NNTP
   reader suite for PC's running MS-DOS and having Excelan boards
   is available for ftp from ames.arc.nasa.gov; get the pcrrn
   files.  There are two MS-DOS news readers that can be obtained
   from bcm.tmc.edu in the "nfs" directory. They both require
   PC-NFS (from Sun to work). They will both work under PC/TCP
   from FTP Software early this year. Source will be provided at
   that time.

   At least one IBM VM/SP (CMS) version of the Usenet software is
   available.  Interested parties should contact Irwin Tillman of
   Princeton University ([e-mail] or
   [e-mail]) for details.  Another version may also be
   available from Bill Verity at Penn State ([e-mail]).