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

window, you can be chatting with a

friend through an Internet chat program in another.

Unfortunately, using a client program can cost a lot of money. Some

require you to be connected directly to the Internet through an Ethernet

network for example. Others work through modem protocols, such as SLIP,

but public-access sites that allow such access may charge anywhere from

$25 to $200 a month extra for the service.

Your system administrator can give you more information on setting

up one of these connections.

8.8. WHEN THINGS GO WRONG

As the Internet grows ever more popular, its resources come under

more of a strain. If you try to use gopher in the middle of the day, at

least on the East Coast of the U.S., you’ll sometimes notice that it

takes a very long time for particular menus or database searches to come

up. Sometimes, you’ll even get a message that there are too many people

connected to whichever service you’re trying to use and so you can’t get

in. The only alternative is to either try again in 20 minutes or so, or

wait until later in the day, when the load might be lower. When this

happens in veronica, try one of the other veronica entries.

When you retrieve a file through gopher, you’ll sometimes be asked

if you want to store it under some ludicrously long name (there go our

friends the system administrators again, using 128 characters just

because Unix lets them). With certain MS-DOS communications programs, if

that name is longer than one line, you won’t be able to backspace all the

way back to the first line if you want to give it a simpler name.

Backspace as far as you can. Then, when you get ready to download it to

your home computer, remember that the file name will be truncated on your

end, because of MS-DOS’s file-naming limitations. Worse, your computer

might even reject the whole thing. What to do? Instead of saving it to

your home directory, mail it to yourself. It should show up in your mail

by the time you exit gopher. Then, use your mail command for saving it

to your home directory — at which point you can name it anything you want.

Now you can download it.

8.9 FYI

David Riggins maintains a list of gophers by type and category. You

can find the most recent one at the ftp site ftp.einet.net, in the pub

directory. Look for a file with a name like “gopher-jewels.txt.”

Alternately, you can get on a mailing list to get the latest version sent

to your e-mailbox automatically. Send a mail message to gopherjewelslist-

[email protected] (yep, that first part is all one word). Leave

the “subject:” line blank, and as a message, write SUBSCRIBE.

Blake Gumprecht maintains a list of gopher and telnet sites related

to, or run by, the government. He posts it every three weeks to the

news.answers and soc.answers newsgroups on Usenet. It can also be

obtained via anonymous ftp from rtfm.mit.edu, as

/pub/usenet/news.answers/us-govt-net-pointers.

Students at the University of Michigan’s School of Information and

Library Studies, recently compiled separate lists of Internet resources

in 11 specific areas, from aeronautics to theater. They can be obtained

via gopher at gopher.lib.umich.edu, in the “What’s New and Featured

Resources” menu.

The Usenet newsgroups comp.infosystems.gopher and

comp.infosystems.wais are places to go for technical discussions about

gophers and WAISs respectively.

The Interpedia project is an attempt to take gopher one step

further, by creating an online repository of all of the interesting and

useful information availble on the Net and from its users. To get on the

mailing list for the project, send an e-mail message, with a “subject:”

of “subscribe” to [email protected]. You can get

supporting documentation for the project via anonymous ftp at ftp.lm.com

in the pub/interpedia directory.

Chapter 9: ADVANCED E-MAIL

9.1 THE FILE’S IN THE MAIL

E-mail by itself is a powerful tool, and by now you may be

sending e-mail messages all over the place. You might even be on a

mailing list or two. But there is a lot more to e-mail than just

sending messages. If your host system does not have access to ftp,

or it doesn’t have access to every ftp site on the Net, you can have

programs and files sent right to your mailbox. And using some simple

techniques, you can use e-mail to send data files such as spreadsheets,

or even whole programs, to friends and colleagues around the world.

A key to both is a set of programs known as encoders and

decoders. For all its basic power, Net e-mail has a big problem: it

can’t handle graphics characters or the control codes found in even

the simplest of computer programs. Encoders however, can translate

these into forms usable in e-mail, while decoders turn them back into

a form that you can actually use. If you are using a Unix-based host

system, chances are it already has an encoder and decoder online that

you can use. These programs will also let you use programs posted in

several Usenet newsgroups, such as comp.binaries.ibm.pc.

If both you and the person with whom you want to exchange files use

Unix host systems, you’re in luck because virtually all Unix

host systems have encoder/decoder programs online. For now, let’s

assume that’s the case. First, upload the file you want to send to your

friend to your host site (ask your system administrator how to upload a

file to your name or “home” directory if you don’t already know how).

Then type

uuencode file file > file.uu

and hit enter. “File” is the name of the file you want to prepare for

mailing, and yes, you have to type the name twice! The > is a Unix

command that tells the system to call the “encoded” file “file.uu”

(you could actually call it anything you want).

Now to get it into a mail message. The quick and dirty way is to

type

mail friend

where “friend” is your friend’s address. At the subject line, tell

her the name of the enclosed file. When you get the blank line, type

~r file.uu

or whatever you called the file, and hit enter. (on some systems, the ~

may not work; if so, ask your system administrator what to use). This

inserts the file into your mail message. Hit control-D, and your file

is on its way!

On the other end, when your friend goes into her mailbox, she

should transfer it to her home directory. Then she should type

uudecode file.name

and hit enter. This creates a new file in her name directory with

whatever name you originally gave it. She can then download it to her

own computer. Before she can actually use it, though, she’ll have to

open it up with a text processor and delete the mail header that has

been “stamped” on it. If you use a mailer program that automatically

appends a “signature,” tell her about that so she can delete that as

well.

9.2 RECEIVING FILES

If somebody sends you a file through the mail, you’ll have to go

through a couple of steps to get it into a form you can actually use. If

you are using the simple mail program, go into mail and type

w # file.name

where # is the number of the message you want to transfer and

file.name is what you want to call the resulting file. In pine, call

up the message and hit your O key and then E. You’ll then be asked

for a file name. In elm, call up the message and hit your S key.

You’ll get something that looks like this:

=file.request

Type a new file name and hit enter (if you hit enter without

typing a file name, the message will be saved to another mail folder,

not your home directory).

In all three cases, exit the mail program to return to your host

system’s command line. Because the file has been encoded for mail

delivery, you now have to run a decoder. At the command line, type

uudecode file.name

where file.name is the file you created while in mail. Uudecode will

create a new, uncompressed binary file. In some cases, you may have to

run it through some other programs (for example, if it is in “tar” form),

but generally it should now be ready for you to download to your own

computer (on which you might then have to run a de-compressor program

such as PKXZIP).

9.3 FILES TO NON-INTERNET SITES

What if your friend only connects with a non-Unix system, such as

CompuServe or MCIMail? There are programs available for MS-DOS, Apple

and Amiga computers that will encode and decode files. Of course, since

you can’t send one of these programs to your friend via e-mail (how would

she un-encode it?), you’ll have to mail (the old-fashioned way) or give

her a diskette with the program on it first. Then, she can get the file

by e-mail and go through the above process (only on her own computer) to

get a usable file. Remember to give her an encoder program as well, if

she wants to send you files in return.

For MS-DOS machines, you’ll want to get uunecode.com and

uudecode.com. Both can be found through anonymous ftp at

wuarchive.wustl.edu in the /mirrors/msdos/starter directory. The MS-

DOS version is as easy to use as the Unix one: Just type

uudecode filename.ext

and hit enter.

Mac users should get a program called uutool, which can be found

in the info-mac/util directory on sumex-aim.stanford.edu.

Think twice before sending somebody a giant file. Although large

sites connected directly to the Internet can probably handle mega-files,

many smaller systems cannot. Some commercial systems, such as CompuServe

and MCIMail, limit the size of mail messages their users can receive.

Fidonet doesn’t even allow encoded messages. In general, a file size of

30,000 or so bytes is a safe upper limit for non-Internet systems.

9.4 GETTING FTP FILES VIA E-MAIL

To help people without ftp access, a number of ftp sites have set up

mail servers (also known as archive servers) that allow you to get files

via e-mail. You send a request to one of these machines and they send

back the file you want. As with ftp, you’ll be able to find everything

from historical documents to software (but please note that if you do

have access to ftp, that method is always quicker and ties up fewer

resources than using e-mail).

Some interesting or useful mail servers include:

[email protected] Files of “frequently asked questions”

related to Usenet; state-by-state lists of U.S. representatives and

Senators and their addresses and office phone numbers.

[email protected] Information about the Electronic Frontier

Foundation; documents about legal issues on the Net.

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