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NetWeek 3/13/88
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********* A BITNET news summary for the week of March 13, 1988 **********
NetWeek provides a brief look at recent events in Bitnet. Items noted here
will be covered in further detail in NetMonth. For a subscription send the
following command to LISTSERV@MARIST: SUB NETMONTH your_name. NetWeek is a
publication of the Bitnet Services Library.
Editor: Chris Condon, CONDON@YALEVM Issue #7
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* The DECWRL archive server: ARCHIVE-SERVER@DECWRL.DEC.COM
The archive server at DECWRL.DEC.COM is a mail-response server. This
means that you must send all commands to through electronic mail.
Each command you send ARCHIVE-SERVER must be the first word on a line. The
archive server reads your entire message before it does anything, so you
can have several different commands in a single message. You can use any
combination of upper and lower case letters in the commands.
The archives are organized into a series of directories and subdirectories.
Each directory has an index, and each subdirectory has an index. The top-
level index gives you an overview of what is in the subdirectories, and the
index for each subdirectory tells you what is in it.
COMMANDS:
HELP: The command HELP or SEND HELP causes the server to send you a help
file. No other commands are honored in a message that asks for help (the
server figures that you had better read the help message before you do
anything else).
INDEX: If your message contains a line whose first word is INDEX, then the
server will send you the top-level index of the contents of the archive. If
there are other words on that line that match the name of subdirectories,
then the indexes for those subdirectories are sent instead of the top-level
index. For example, you can say
INDEX
or
INDEX PROGRAMS
or
INDEX RECIPES
You can then send back another message to the archive server, using a SEND
command (see below) to ask it to send you the files whose name you learned
from that list.
SEND: If your message contains a line whose first word is SEND, then the
archive server will send you the item(s) named on the rest of the line. To
name an item, you give its directory and its name. For example:
SEND RECIPE AFRICAN-STEW
or
SEND PROGRAM RCKEEP
Once you have named a category, you can put as many names as you like on
the rest of the line; they will all be taken from that category. For
example:
SEND RECIPE CHOC-SHIP-1 CHOC-CHIP-2 CHOC-CHIP-3
NOTES:
The archive server acknowledges every request by return mail. If you don't
get a message back in a day or two you should assume that something is
going wrong.
Don't send mail with long lines. If you want to ask for 20 recipes in one
request, you don't need to put all 20 of them in one "send" command. The
archive server is quite able to handle long lines, but before your mail
message is received by the archive server it might pass through relay
computers that will choke on long lines.
FAIRNESS:
The archive server contains many safeguards to ensure that it is not
monopolized by people asking for large amounts of data. The mailer is set
up so that it will send no more than a fixed amount of data each day. If
the work queue contains more requests than the day's quota, then the unsent
files will not be processed until the next day. Whenever the mailer is run
to send its day's quota, it sends the requests out shortest-first.
If you have a request waiting in the work queue and you send in another
request, the new request is added to the old one (thereby increasing its
size) rather than being filed anew. This prevents you from being able to
send in a large number of small requests as a way of beating the system.
If you request 10 recipes together, you will get substantially higher
priority than if you make 10 requests for 1 recipe each.
The reason for all of these quotas and limitations is that the delivery
resources are finite, and there are many tens of thousands of people who
would like to make use of the archive.
_
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__--- The
__----- Bitnet
__------- Services
___________ Library "Because We're Here."
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