Big Dummy's Guide To The Internet by Electronic Frontier Foundation (early reader chapter books .txt) 📕

periodically

posts his “Updated Internet Services List” in the former. The

alt.bbs.internet newsgroup is also where you’ll find Aydin Edguer’s

compendium of FAQs related to Internet bulletin-board systems.

Peter Scott, who maintains the Hytelnet database, runs a

mailing list about new telnet services and changes in existing ones.

To get on the list, send him a note at [email protected].

Gleason Sackman maintains another mailing list dedicated to new

Internet services and news about the new uses to which the Net is being

put. To subscribe, send a message to [email protected]. Leave the

“subject:” line blank, and as your message, write: Sub net-happenings

Your Name.

Chapter 7: FTP

7.1 TONS OF FILES

Hundreds of systems connected to Internet have file libraries, or

archives, accessible to the public. Much of this consists of free or low-

cost shareware programs for virtually every make of computer. If you

want a different communications program for your IBM, or feel like

playing a new game on your Amiga, you’ll be able to get it from the Net.

But there are also libraries of documents as well. If you

want a copy of a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision, you can find it on

the Net. Copies of historical documents, from the Magna Carta to the

Declaration of Independence are also yours for the asking, along with a

translation of a telegram from Lenin ordering the execution of

rebellious peasants. You can also find song lyrics, poems, even

summaries of every “Lost in Space” episode ever made. You can also find

extensive files detailing everything you could ever possibly want to know

about the Net itself. First you’ll see how to get these files; then

we’ll show you where they’re kept.

The commonest way to get these files is through the file transfer

protocol, or ftp. As with telnet, not all systems that connect to the

Net have access to ftp. However, if your system is one of these, you’ll

be able to get many of these files through e-mail (see the next chapter).

Starting ftp is as easy as using telnet. At your host system’s command

line, type

ftp site.name

and hit enter, where “site.name” is the address of the ftp site you want

to reach. One major difference between telnet and ftp is that it is

considered bad form to connect to most ftp sites during their business

hours (generally 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. local time). This is because

transferring files across the network takes up considerable computing

power, which during the day is likely to be needed for whatever the

computer’s main function is. There are some ftp sites that are

accessible to the public 24 hours a day, though. You’ll find these noted

in the list of ftp sites in section 7.6

7.2 YOUR FRIEND ARCHIE

How do you find a file you want, though?

Until a few years ago, this could be quite the pain — there was

no master directory to tell you where a given file might be stored on

the Net. Who’d want to slog through hundreds of file libraries looking

for something?

Alan Emtage, Bill Heelan and Peter Deutsch, students at McGill

University in Montreal, asked the same question. Unlike the weather,

though, they did something about it.

They created a database system, called archie, that would

periodically call up file libraries and basically find out what they had

available. In turn, anybody could dial into archie, type in a file name,

and see where on the Net it was available. Archie currently catalogs

close to 1,000 file libraries around the world.

Today, there are three ways to ask archie to find a file for you:

through telnet, “client” Archie program on your own host system or e-

mail. All three methods let you type in a full or partial file name and

will tell you where on the Net it’s stored.

If you have access to telnet, you can telnet to one of the following

addresses: archie.mcgill.ca; archie.sura.net; archie.unl.edu;

archie.ans.net; or archie.rutgers.edu. If asked for a log-in name, type

archie

and hit enter.

When you connect, the key command is prog, which you use in this

form:

prog filename

followed by enter, where “filename” is the program or file you’re

looking for. If you’re unsure of a file’s complete name, try typing in

part of the name. For example, “PKZIP” will work as well as

“PKZIP204.EXE.” The system does not support DOS or Unix wildcards.

If you ask archie to look for “PKZIP*,” it will tell you it couldn’t

find anything by that name. One thing to keep in mind is that a file is

not necessarily the same as a program — it could also be a document.

This means you can use archie to search for, say, everything online

related to the Beetles, as well as computer programs and graphics files.

A number of Net sites now have their own archie programs that

take your request for information and pass it onto the nearest archie

database — ask your system administrator if she has it online. These

“client” programs seem to provide information a lot more quickly than the

actual archie itself! If it is available, at your host system’s command

line, type

archie -s filename

where filename is the program or document you’re looking for, and hit

enter. The -s tells the program to ignore case in a file name and lets

you search for partial matches. You might actually want to type it this

way:

archie -s filename|more

which will stop the output every screen (handy if there are many sites

that carry the file you want). Or you could open a file on your computer

with your text-logging function.

The third way, for people without access to either of the above, is e-

mail.

Send a message to [email protected]. You can leave the

subject line blank. Inside the message, type

prog filename

where filename is the file you’re looking for. You can ask archie to

look up several programs by putting their names on the same “prog” line,

like this:

prog file1 file2 file3

Within a few hours, archie will write back with a list of the

appropriate sites.

In all three cases, if there is a system that has your file,

you’ll get a response that looks something like this:

Host sumex-aim.stanford.edu

Location: /info-mac/comm

FILE -rw-r—r-- 258256 Feb 15 17:07 zterm-09.hqx

Location: /info-mac/misc

FILE -rw-r—r-- 7490 Sep 12 1991 zterm-sys7-color-icons.hqx

Chances are, you will get a number of similar looking responses

for each program. The “host” is the system that has the file. The

“Location” tells you which directory to look in when you connect to

that system. Ignore the funny-looking collections of r’s and hyphens

for now. After them, come the size of the file or directory listing

in bytes, the date it was uploaded, and the name of the file.

7.3 GETTING THE FILES

Now you want to get that file.

Assuming your host site does have ftp, you connect in a similar

fashion to telnet, by typing:

ftp sumex-aim.stanford.edu

(or the name of whichever site you want to reach). Hit enter. If the

connection works, you’ll see this:

Connected to sumex-aim.stanford.edu.

220 SUMEX-AIM FTP server (Version 4.196 Mon Jan 13 13:52:23 PST 1992) ready.

Name (sumex-aim.stanford.edu:adamg):

If nothing happens after a minute or so, hit control-C to return

to your host system’s command line. But if it has worked, type

anonymous

and hit enter. You’ll see a lot of references on the Net to

“anonymous ftp.” This is how it gets its name — you don’t really have

to tell the library site what your name is. The reason is that these

sites are set up so that anybody can gain access to certain public

files, while letting people with accounts on the sites to log on and

access their own personal files. Next, you’ll be asked for your

password. As a password, use your e-mail address. This will then come

up:

230 Guest connection accepted. Restrictions apply.

Remote system type is UNIX.

Using binary mode to transfer files.

ftp>

Now type

ls

and hit enter. You’ll see something awful like this:

200 PORT command successful.

150 Opening ASCII mode data connection for /bin/ls.

total 2636

-rw-rw-r— 1 0 31 4444 Mar 3 11:34 README.POSTING

dr-xr-xr-x 2 0 1 512 Nov 8 11:06 bin

-rw-r—r-- 1 0 0 11030960 Apr 2 14:06 core

dr—r--r— 2 0 1 512 Nov 8 11:06 etc

drwxrwsr-x 5 13 22 512 Mar 19 12:27 imap

drwxr-xr-x 25 1016 31 512 Apr 4 02:15 info-mac

drwxr-x--- 2 0 31 1024 Apr 5 15:38 pid

drwxrwsr-x 13 0 20 1024 Mar 27 14:03 pub

drwxr-xr-x 2 1077 20 512 Feb 6 1989 tmycin

226 Transfer complete.

ftp>

Ack! Let’s decipher this Rosetta Stone.

First, ls is the ftp command for displaying a directory (you can

actually use dir as well, but if you’re used to MS-DOS, this could lead

to confusion when you try to use dir on your host system, where it won’t

work, so it’s probably better to just remember to always use ls for a

directory while online).

The very first letter on each line tells you whether the listing is

for a directory or a file. If the first letter is a ``d,’’ or an “l”,

it’s a directory. Otherwise, it’s a file.

The rest of that weird set of letters and dashes consist of “flags”

that tell the ftp site who can look at, change or delete the file. You

can safely ignore it. You can also ignore the rest of the line until you

get to the second number, the one just before the date. This tells you

how large the file is,