You can install xgopher to have a look. More or less it is what they used before www came on-line. It is a university service menu front-end to browse lists of files, download them and view them.
You connect to a gopher server, and follow it's menu commands. It may have interesting links to archie, or whatever the server administrator felt like adding. Since your initial gopher server probably links to others, you may find information that www/html doesn't have, or connect to search engines that are not easy to find. It is useful when your server is a local campus facility, otherwise use http.
Archie is a system where all the universities cooperate to produce a huge index of files, of their anonymous ftp servers. If you know the name of a file (or part name!), you ask archie to find it for you.
Archie returns a list of matching files, and where they are. To save time, archie only returns the first find on each server, so a loose search might locate a README that hasn't changed, when the .tgz file has.
You can use a local archie client, or you can use somebody's WWW to Archie interface (eg ArchiePlex), a WWW/CGI form.
University ftp machines include mirrors of other ftp machines. src.doc.ic.ac has many files from many sources, and is useful for UK clients.
ArchiePlex is a WWW/CGI fromt-end form for archie (There must be others). You point your browser at http://www.lib.ox.ac.uk/internet/archieplex/, fill in the form and it does the interfacing.
http://archie.doc.ic.ac.uk//archieplexform.html for Imperial College.
Don't believe the results blindly. Archie uses the file's mtime, which could be close to accurate, but is easily wrong. EG when copying a CDROM onto disk, the system administrator must remember to tell cpio to preserve the mtime on files (-pvdm). The mtime of the original source file must also be correct!
interestingly, gzip'ing a file to file.gz, puts the file's mtime into the .gz header. Browsers (eg netscape) that fetch the file and expand them for viewing AND for processing, are not doing you any favours, when they save the file as uncompressed.
Archie stops searching a host on the first matching files found. This might be package-1.2.README, when package-2.3 is what you are looking for! There is also the risk that the file is unavailable when the index item says it should be (though I don't understand why that happens).
By the time you read this, the bugs shown will have changed. But here's the story ...
browser ... http://www.lib.ox.ac.uk/internet/archieplex/doc/form.html set: nicer # eg batch processes get fewer bigger chunks search for: xearth save as: ./archieplex.xearth set: Not so nice search again sorted by date save as file: 9602/sess1/archieplex.xearth.sortedThe file you get back is an HTML pagem with hotlinks to the servers and files. It makes it very easy to fetch the file you have just found. This looks great, but needs a bit of manual interpretation.
<-! very long line hated by groff ->
ftp://scitsc.wlv.ac.uk/pub/infomagic/source+internet/source.code.cdrom.Oct94/X11R6/contrib/applications/xearth-0.91-0.92.diff.gz
Note that the Oct_94 tells you that something is wrong. When the SysAdmin copied the CDROM to disk, the mtime of the file was set to 'today', not the original date retained.
To avoid this when you copy a tree of files, use the -m option to cpio, and do this as root. To preserve existing file ownerships ls -l /cdrom do
cd /cdrom find . -print | cpio -pvdm /hdc2/cdrom_14
The list shows wlv.ac.uk at the top of the list, followed by sites claiming to have 1.14, followed by sites with 0.92 (then 0.6 - bless them). Sorry wolves, nul points
1 uk scitsc.wlv.ac.uk 2 us ftp.cs.umn.edu # Univ Minnesota (1.14 absent?) 3 no romeo-klive.nvg.unit.no 4 se ftp.luth.se (has both 1.14 and 0.92) 5+ ** 0.92 or 0.6Strangely enough, a later search for 'stretching' also produced a stray result, on the same disk! But that was because the rec.sport.misc FAQ was deleted from the infomagic disk, but the directory thoughtfully left there to see that it really does exist. (Wolf saves pack).
This is an example of an FTP session, looking for a file that isn't there.
gps@trix:/tmp/pkgs_cd/xearth-0.92$ stty erase ^H gps@trix:/tmp/pkgs_cd/xearth-0.92$ ftp -n ftp.cs.umn.edu Connected to ftp.cs.umn.edu. 220 ftp FTP server (Version wu-2.4(14) Mon Dec 11 10:01:35 CST 1995) ready. Remote system type is UNIX. Using binary mode to transfer files. 331 Guest login ok, send your complete e-mail address as password. Password: 230-Welcome to the FTP Site for the University of Minnesota, 230-Department of Computer Science. 230- 230-Commonly used packages and their paths on our site: 230-Package Mirror site Local Directory 230-Netscape ftp.netscape.com /packages/ftp.netscape.com 230-Tcl-Tk ftp.smli.com /pub/misc/tcl 230-GNU prep.ai.mit.edu /packages/gnu 230- 230-X11: All located in /packages/X11/ 230-Packages mirrored from ftp.x.org: 230- R5 R5-Contrib R6 R6-Contrib 230- 230-Linux: All located in /packages/linux/ 230- Slackware ftp.cdrom.com /slackware 230- Kernel ftp.cs.helsinki.fi /kernel 230- Docs sunsite.unc.edu /docs 230- 230-NetBSD: All located in /packages/NetBSD/ 230-Packages mirrored from ftp.netbsd.org: 230- Current NetBSD-1.1 230- 230-NetBSD-Amiga is mirrored from ftp.uni-regensburg.de in /pub/NetBSD-Amiga 230- 230-If you have comments or questions please mail ftp-admin@cs.umn.edu 230- 230-Please read the file README 230- it was last modified on Thu Mar 16 15:32:28 1995 - 336 days ago 230 Guest login ok, access restrictions apply. ftp> hash ftp> cd pub/NetBSD-Amiga/contrib/X11 250 CWD command successful. ftp> ls xe* ,.. ,.. ls xe* shows only 0.92 !! where has 1.14 gone? ftp> quit
This gives you the date of the package, rather than the date of the tar file.
Now locate the xearth files in the directory. Look-at (and save to disk) the 91-92 diffs. The first lines are the times and dates of the HISTORY file ie:
diff -r -c xearth-0.91/HISTORY xearth-0.92/HISTORY *** xearth-0.91/HISTORY Wed May 25 02:05:17 1994 =-- xearth-0.92/HISTORY Wed Jun 1 19:38:25 1994 ***************This shows that the HISTORY file is being used properly (probably), so the correct date is in the HISTORY file line 1, and for a patch file it's the top 3 lines. IE I don't know what is more recent than Jun 1994, but thats the date of this package (it agrees with all sub files).
xearth 0.92 is the version on the CDROM, and it works, so why worry?
The Netscape "Save As ..." dialog has a split mode. The top half is in one directory, the other half in another. To get them the same press FILTER every time you highlight a directory. If you lose the filename, carry on navigating, then cancel and repeat.