ARCHIE

Copyright 1992 by Urban A. LeJeune


     Given the number of hosts being used as archive sites 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 created
at least a partial solution to the problem, a software system
called "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 directory listing of each, which it stores in
a database.  Each site is traversed and updated about once a
month.

     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 that most users
call Archie.  Users can ask archie to search for specific name
strings using the "prog" command.  For example, "prog kcl" would
find all occurrences 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 known archive sites archie
greatly speeds the task of finding a specific program on the net.

     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.

     When telneting to an archie server enter "archie" at the
login prompt.  The following is an archie session.  The "$" on
the first line is the system prompt.  When connected the prompt
will be archie>.  Again anything following a "!" is my comment.

$ telnet archie.rutgers.edu
Trying 128.6.18.15 ...
Connected to dorm.RUTGERS.EDU.
Escape character is '^]'.

SunOS UNIX (dorm.rutgers.edu) (ttyp3)

login: archie
____________________________________________________________
ARCHIE: Rutgers University Archive Server [November 17 1991]

Additional Archie Servers:
North American users: archie.unl.edu
                      archie.ans.net
                      archie.sura.net
Canadian       users: archie.mcgill.ca (original archie server)
Australian     users: archie.au
European       users: archie.funet.fi
                      archie.doc.ic.ac.uk

=> 'help' for help
=> corrections/additions to archie-admin@archie.rutgers.edu
=> bug reports, comments etc. to archie-l@archie.rutgers.edu
______________________________________________________________
archie> prog ucrasm  ! Search for the string ucrasm
# matches / % database searched:  1 /100%
Host ucrmath.ucr.edu   (138.23.146.1)
Last updated 00:09  1 Apr 1992

    Location: /PC/ibmpc
      FILE      rw-r--r--    240168  Feb 15 00:31   ucrasm.zip

archie> whatis mba

acm                     X11 aerial combat simulation (X11)
mbase                   C database engine

! Notice that there were mba strings in each of the above but
! hardly what we were looking for.

archie> quit

Connection closed to dorm.RUTGERS.EDU

     Once files have been located using archie they may be
downloaded as discussed under the FTP lession.  Remember that
UNIX machines require the case to be exactly as shown.  If you
are at the FTP prompt after connecting to ucrmath.ucr.edu as show
above and you try and change directories by issuing the command
"cd pc"
the system will respond stating that the directory pc does not
exist.  However entering "cd PC" will produce the desired
results.