15 NPTN/USA TODAY HEADLINE NEWS ------------------------------------------------ h=Help, x=Exit Free-Net, "go help"=extended help Your Choice ==> The system has a vast and growing collection of public documents, from copies of U.S. and Ohio Supreme Court decisions to the Magna Carta and the U.S. Constitution. It links residents to various government agencies and has daily stories from USA Today. Beyond Usenet (found in the Teleport area), it has a large collection of local conferences on everything from pets to politics. And yes, it's free! Telnet: freenet-in-a.cwru.edu or freenet-in-b.cwru.edu or freenet-in-c.cwru.edu When you connect to Free-Net, you can look around the system. However, if you want to be able to post messages in its conferences or use e-mail, you will have to apply in writing for an account. Information on this is available when you connect. DUBBS. This is a bulletin-board system in Delft in the Netherlands. The conferences and files are mostly in Dutch, but the help files and the system commands themselves are in English. Telnet: tudrwa.tudelft.nl ISCA BBS. Run by the Iowa Student Computer Association, it has more than 100 conferences, including several in foreign languages. After you register, hit K for a list of available conferences and then J to join a particular conference (you have to type in the name of the conference, not the number next to it). Hitting H brings up information about commands. Telnet bbs.isca.uiowa.edu At the "login:" prompt, type bbs and hit enter. Youngstown Free-Net. The people who created Cleveland Free-Net sell their software for $1 to anybody willing to set up a similar system. A number of cities now have their own Free-Nets, including Youngstown, Ohio. Telnet: yfn.ysu.edu At the "login:" prompt, type visitor and hit enter. 6.5 PUTTING THE FINGER ON SOMEONE Finger is a handy little program which lets you find out more about people on the Net -- and lets you tell others on the Net more about yourself. Finger uses the same concept as telnet or ftp. But it works with only one file, called .plan (yes, with a period in front). This is a text file an Internet user creates with a text editor in his home directory. You can put your phone number in there, tell a little bit about yourself, or write almost anything at all. To finger somebody else's .plan file, type this at the command line: finger email-address where email-address is the person's e-mail address. If that person's site allows incoming finger requests (not all do), You'll get back a display that shows the last time the person was online, whether they've gotten any new mail since that time and what, if anything, is in their .plan file. Some people and institutions have come up with creative uses for these .plan files, letting you do everything from checking the weather in Massachusetts to getting the latest baseball standings. Try fingering these e-mail addresses: weather@cirrus.mit.edu Latest National Weather Service weather forecasts for regions in Massachusetts. quake@geophys.washington.edu Locations and magnitudes of recent earthquakes around the world. jtchern@ocf.berkeley.edu Current major-league baseball standings and results of the previous day's games. nasanews@space.mit.edu The day's events at NASA. coke@cs.cmu.edu See how many cans of each type of soda are left in a particular soda machine in the computer-science department of Carnegie-Mellon University. 6.6 FINDING SOMEONE ON THE NET So you have a friend and you want to find out if he has an Internet account to which you can write? The quickest way may be to just pick up the phone, call him and ask him. Although there are a variety of "white pages" services available on the Internet, they are far from complete -- college students, users of commercial services such as CompuServe and many Internet public-access sites, and many others simply won't be listed. Major e-mail providers are working on a universal directory system, but that could be some time away. In the meantime, a couple of "white pages" services might give you some leads, or even just entertain you as you look up famous people or long- lost acquaintances. The whois directory provides names, e-mail and postal mail address and often phone numbers for people listed in it. To use it, telnet to internic.net No log-on is needed. The quickest way to use it is to type whois name at the prompt, where "name" is the last name or organization name you're looking for. If there's a match, you'll get back an e-mail listing. Another service worth trying, especially since it seems to give beginners fewer problems, is the Knowbot Information Service reachable by telnet at info.cnri.reston.va.us 185 Again, no log-on is needed. This service actually searches through a variety of other "white pages" systems, including the user directory for MCIMail. To look for somebody, type query name where "name" is the last name of the person you're looking for. You can get details of other commands by hitting a question mark at the prompt. You can also use the knowbot system by e-mail. Start a message to netaddress@info.cnri.reston.va.us You can leave the "subject:" line blank. As your message, type query name for the simplest type of search. If you want details on more complex searches, add another line: man Another way to search is via the Usenet name server. This is a system at MIT that keeps track of the e-mail addresses of everybody who posts a Usenet message that appears at MIT. It works by e-mail. Send a message to mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu Leave the "subject:" line blank. As your message, write send usenet-addresses/lastname where "lastname" is the last name of the person you're looking for. The system will write back with any matches and the associated addresses. 6.7 WHEN THINGS GO WRONG * Nothing happens when you try to connect to a telnet site. The site could be down for maintenance or problems. * You get a "host unavailable" message. The telnet site is down for some reason. Try again later. * You get a "host unknown" message. Check your spelling of the site name. * You type in a password on a telnet site that requires one, and you get a "login incorrect" message. Try logging in again. If you get the message again, hit your control and ] keys at the same time to disengage and return to your host system. * You can't seem to disconnect from a telnet site. Use control-] to disengage and return to your host system. 6.8 FYI The Usenet newsgroups alt.internet.services and alt.bbs.internet can provide pointers to new telnet systems. Scott Yanoff periodically posts his "Updated Internet Services List" in the former. The alt.bbs.internet newsgroup is also where you'll find Aydin Edguer's compendium of FAQs related to Internet bulletin-board systems. Peter Scott, who maintains the Hytelnet database, runs a mailing list about new telnet services and changes in existing ones. To get on the list, send him a note at scott@sklib.usask.ca. Gleason Sackman maintains another mailing list dedicated to new Internet services and news about the new uses to which the Net is being put. To subscribe, send a message to listserv@internic.net. Leave the "subject:" line blank, and as your message, write: Sub net-happenings Your Name. The soc.net-people newsgroup is a place to ask about people you can't locate elsewhere. Chapter 7: FTP 7.1 TONS OF FILES hundreds of systems connected to Internet have file libraries, or archives, accessible to the public. Much of this consists of free or low- cost shareware programs for virtually every make of computer. If you want a different communications program for your IBM, or feel like playing a new game on your Amiga, you'll be able to get it from the Net. But there are also libraries of documents as well. If you want a copy of a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision, you can find it on the Net. Copies of historical documents, from the Magna Carta to the Declaration of Independence are also yours for the asking, along with a translation of a telegram from Lenin ordering the execution of rebellious peasants. You can also find song lyrics, poems, even summaries of every "Lost in Space" episode ever made. You can also find extensive files detailing everything you could ever possibly want to know about the Net itself. First you'll see how to get these files; then we'll show you where they're kept. Increasingly, you can get these files via gopher or the World-Wide Web (see Chapter 8 for gopher; Chapter 9 for the Web). But it's still good to know how to use the original way of getting files across the Net: file-transfer protocol, or FTP, because there is still a large number of files stil stored on FTP sites. Starting ftp is as easy as using telnet. At your host system's command line, type ftp site.name and hit enter, where "site.name" is the address of the ftp site you want to reach. One major difference between telnet and ftp is that it is considered bad form to connect to most ftp sites during their business hours (generally 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. local time). This is because transferring files across the network takes up considerable computing power, which during the day is likely to be needed for whatever the computer's main function is. There are some ftp sites that are accessible to the public 24 hours a day, though. You'll find these noted in the list of ftp sites in section 7.6. 7.2 YOUR FRIEND ARCHIE How do you find a file you want, though? Until a few years ago, this could be quite the pain -- there was no master directory to tell you where a given file might be stored on the Net. Who'd want to slog through hundreds of file libraries looking for something? Alan Emtage, Bill Heelan and Peter Deutsch, students at McGill University in Montreal, asked the same question. Unlike the weather, though, they did something about it. They created a database system, called archie, that would periodically call up file libraries and basically find out what they had available. In turn, anybody could dial into archie, type in a file name, and see where on the Net it was available. Archie currently catalogs some 1,000 file libraries around the world. Today, there are three ways to ask archie to find a file for you: through telnet, "client" Archie program on your own host system or e-mail. All three methods let you type in a full or partial file name and will tell you where on the Net it's stored. If you have access to telnet, you can telnet to one of the following addresses: archie.mcgill.ca; archie.sura.net; archie.unl.edu; archie.ans.net; or archie.rutgers.edu. If asked for a log-in name, type archie and hit enter. When you connect, the key command is prog, which you use in this form: prog filename Followed by enter, where "filename" is the program or file you're looking for. If you're unsure of a file's complete name, try typing in part of the name. For example, "PKZIP" will work as well as "PKZIP204.EXE." The system does not support DOS or Unix wildcards. If you ask archie to look for "PKZIP*," it will tell you it couldn't find anything by that name. One thing to keep in mind is that a file is not necessarily the same as a program -- it could also be a document. This means you can use archie to search for, say, everything online related to the Beetles, as well as computer programs and graphics files. A number of Net sites now have their own archie programs that take your request for information and pass it onto the nearest archie database -- ask your system administrator if she has it online. These "client" programs seem to provide information a lot more quickly than the actual archie itself! If it is available, at your host system's command line, type archie -s filename where filename is the program or document you're looking for, and hit enter. The -s tells the program to ignore case in a file name and lets you search for partial matches. You might actually want to type it this way: archie -s filename|more which will stop the output every screen (handy if there are many sites that carry the file you want). Or you could open a file on your computer with your text-logging function. The third way, for people without access to either of the above, is e- mail. Send a message to archie@quiche.cs.mcgill.ca. You can leave the subject line blank. Inside the message, type prog filename where filename is the file you're looking for. You can ask archie to look up several programs by putting their names on the same "prog" line, like this: prog file1 file2 file3 Within a few hours, archie will write back with a list of the appropriate sites. In all three cases, if there is a system that has your file, you'll get a response that looks something like this: Host sumex-aim.stanford.edu Location: /info-mac/comm FILE -rw-r--r-- 258256 Feb 15 17:07 zterm-09.hqx Location: /info-mac/misc FILE -rw-r--r-- 7490 Sep 12 1991 zterm-sys7-color-icons.hqx Chances are, you will get a number of similar looking responses for each program. The "host" is the system that has the file. The "Location" tells you which directory to look in when you connect to that system. Ignore the funny-looking collections of r's and hyphens for now. After them, come the size of the file or directory listing in bytes, the date it was uploaded, and the name of the file. 7.3 GETTING THE FILES Now you want to get that file. Assuming your host site does have ftp, you connect in a similar fashion to telnet, by typing: ftp sumex-aim.stanford.edu (or the name of whichever site you want to reach). Hit enter. If the connection works, you'll see this: Connected to sumex-aim.stanford.edu. 220 SUMEX-AIM FTP server (Version 4.196 Mon Jan 13 13:52:23 PST 1992) ready. Name (sumex-aim.stanford.edu:adamg): If nothing happens after a minute or so, hit control-C to return to your host system's command line. But if it has worked, type anonymous and hit enter. You'll see a lot of references on the Net to "anonymous ftp." This is how it gets its name -- you don't really have to tell the library site what your name is. The reason is that these sites are set up so that anybody can gain access to certain public files, while letting people with accounts on the sites to log on and access their own personal files. Next, you'll be asked for your password. As a password, use your e-mail address. This will then come up: 230 Guest connection accepted. Restrictions apply. Remote system type is UNIX. Using binary mode to transfer files. ftp> Now type ls and hit enter. You'll see something awful like this: 200 PORT command successful. 150 Opening ASCII mode data connection for /bin/ls. total 2636 -rw-rw-r-- 1 0 31 4444 Mar 3 11:34 README.POSTING dr-xr-xr-x 2 0 1 512 Nov 8 11:06 bin -rw-r--r-- 1 0 0 11030960 Apr 2 14:06 core dr--r--r-- 2 0 1 512 Nov 8 11:06 etc drwxrwsr-x 5 13 22 512 Mar 19 12:27 imap drwxr-xr-x 25 1016 31 512 Apr 4 02:15 info-mac drwxr-x--- 2 0 31 1024 Apr 5 15:38 pid drwxrwsr-x 13 0 20 1024 Mar 27 14:03 pub drwxr-xr-x 2 1077 20 512 Feb 6 1989 tmycin 226 Transfer complete. ftp> Ack! Let's decipher this Rosetta Stone. First, ls is the ftp command for displaying a directory (you can actually use dir as well, but if you're used to MS-DOS, this could lead to confusion when you try to use dir on your host system, where it won't work, so it's probably better to just remember to always use ls for a directory while online). The very first letter on each line tells you whether the listing is for a directory or a file. If the first letter is a ``d,'' or an "l", it's a directory. Otherwise, it's a file. The rest of that weird set of letters and dashes consist of "flags" that tell the ftp site who can look at, change or delete the file. You can safely ignore it. You can also ignore the rest of the line until you get to the second number, the one just before the date. This tells you how large the file is, in bytes. If the line is for a directory, the number gives you a rough indication of how many items are in that directory -- a directory listing of 512 bytes is relatively small. Next comes the date the file or directory was uploaded, followed (finally!) by its name. Notice the README.POSTING file up at the top of the directory. Most archive sites have a "read me" document, which usually contains some basic information about the site, its resources and how to use them. Let's get this file, both for the information in it and to see how to transfer files from there to here. At the ftp> prompt, type get README and hit enter. Note that ftp sites are no different from Unix sites in general: they are case-sensitive. You'll see something like this: 200 PORT command successful. 150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for README (4444 bytes). 226 Transfer complete. 4444 bytes received in 1.177seconds (3.8 Kbytes/s) And that's it! The file is now located in your home directory on your host system, from which you can now download it to your own computer. The simple "get" command is the key to transferring a file from an archive site to your host system. If you want to download more than one file at a time (say a series of documents, use mget instead of get; for example: mget *.txt This will transfer copies of every file ending with .txt in the given directory. Before each file is copied, you'll be asked if you're sure you want it. Despite this, mget could still save you considerable time -- you won't have to type in every single file name. If you want to save even more time, and are sure you really want ALL of the given files, type prompt before you do the mget command. This will turn off the prompt, and all the files will be zapped right into your home directory. There is one other command to keep in mind. If you want to get a copy of a computer program, type bin and hit enter. This tells the ftp site and your host site that you are sending a binary file, i.e., a program. Most ftp sites now use binary format as a default, but it's a good idea to do this in case you've connected to one of the few that doesn't. To switch to a directory, type cd directory-name (substituting the name of the directory you want to access) and hit enter. Type ls and hit enter to get the file listing for that particular directory. To move back up the directory tree, type cd .. (note the space between the d and the first period) and hit enter. Or