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Grex Internet Item 16: The archie item
Entered by rcurl on Tue Jan 25 05:57:33 UTC 1994:

This is the archie item. Tell astonishing tales, ask questions, etc.

6 responses total.

#1 of 6 by rcurl on Tue Jan 25 06:22:36 1994:

I've discovered archie. omni (in radio) said virtuoso is a good mac
packet TNC driver. Where's virtuoso, I said. It's time to learn archie,
I answered. _The Whole Internet_ (p. 158) gave me a host to telnet
(archie.sura.net), and sure enough I logged in, wherever it is, and
ran "set sub" and "prog virtuoso". It chewed on that for quite a while,
and out came 26 files/sites. One (1) was the packet radio virtuoso, at
ftp.luth.se (it said). But that's the radio story.

Times are changing. A warning was issued in archie.sura.net that interactive
logins will be limited in the future (i.e., telnet logins), and that
one should use an archie client. I'm not sure what the distinction is
here, especially if I use a Telnet client on my Mac - is it how frequently
the client and the host must exchange packets, more with Telnet, than
a dedicated client? Well anyway, the problem was to find an archie client.

archie.sura.net said to ftp to /pub/archie/clients, so I did with Fetch.
However the files were .bin, not .hqx, and I have never been able to get
Fetch to work on a binary file over MacPPP. So I went looking for
ftp.luth.se with Fetch and found virtuoso in /pub/mac/comm/PACKET. But
right next to it was a folder called ARCHIE. Aha! But these were .bin
files also, and Fetch failed. Well, time to rev up Versaterm FTP Client,
and this succeeded in downloading Archie 0.9B. This appears to be a recent
private hack, and I do not know if it is what is at archie.sura.net. 

Well, end of story for now, as I *had* to go to sleep by the time I
got to this point, and the MichNet NAS has been busy this evening. Now,
that is strange. I have *never* gotten a busy signal on the NAS. Either
there is a fault, or people are cranking up PPP like gangbusters.

#2 of 6 by hawkeye on Tue Jan 25 16:21:37 1994:

"archie" can be irritatingly slow when you want something *right now*!
 
I've also found that only the *main* archie server really connects with
almost everything.  The other archie sites are limited, somehow, by which
sites they check.

#3 of 6 by rcurl on Wed Jan 26 07:00:00 1994:

I've launched Archie 0.9B and, in fact, have it running in background
while I'm on this Telnet link to grex. Its been over an hour, and it is
not producing! I chose archie.unl.edu. This may be what hawkeye is
referring to. I got quick action when I telnetted to archie.sura.net.
Hmmm. I think I'll drop the .unl call, and take a crack at .sura. 
There doesn't seem to be an "I give up" dialog on Archie0.9B.

#4 of 6 by rcurl on Wed Jan 26 07:39:08 1994:

Well, that's the answer. I got no response from archie.unl.edu in
over an hour, so just tried archie.sura.net, and a list of sites came
back in less than 10 seconds!

#5 of 6 by mju on Tue Feb 8 21:50:45 1994:

The archie client causes less of a load on the archie server, since
you don't tie up a pty and a socket while the search is proceeding.
The archie client uses UDP, so it just sends the request and waits
for the server to reply.

#6 of 6 by remmers on Tue Feb 8 23:00:23 1994:

"I tossed a UDP into the air, it fell to earth I know not where."

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