[ Version 1.4 ] Enclosed you'll find a Prospero client for the archie service. It'll let you query the archie databases without actually using an interactive process on the remote server's machine (e.g., archie.ans.net), resulting in a MUCH better response time. It also helps lessen the load on the archie server itself. What's Archie? It's a system that will let you check a database containing thousands of entries for the files that're available at FTP sites around the world. This is a third child of Clifford Neuman's Prospero project. It's really the Archie client that's included in the prospero stuff, but I've taken out everything that's unnecessary for this client to work. (Aka, you don't have to build all of Prospero to get the Archie client.) Khun Yee Fung wrote an archie client in Perl, George Ferguson has written a client for use with XWindows, based in part upon this code. Also, Scott Stark wrote a NeXT-Step client for the NeXT. Also included in this release is a GNU Emacs Lisp front-end to the archie client. Note that it requires the Ange FTP package to work properly. You can retrieve it from archive.cis.ohio-state.edu in the directory /pub/gnu/emacs/elisp-archive/packages as ange-ftp.tar.Z. Using the Archie Prospero interface in its true form will probably be of interest---check out the file `Prospero' for an example of its interface. If you find it intriguing, you should probably get the full prospero kit from the University of Washington on cs.washington.edu in pub/prospero.tar.Z. Suffice to say, there are now a number of ways to query Archie without bogging a server down with your logins. Check out the man page (or archie.doc, if you're using VMS or DOS) for instructions on how to use this archie client. VMS users please note that you have to put quotes around args that are capital letters; for example, `$ ARCHIE "-L"' to list the available servers. Please check to make sure you don't have "archie" aliased or modified in some way to do a telnet or rlogin (which you may've done before this command-line ability came into being). If Archie consistently hangs (at different times of day with different queries), it's possible that your site has UDP traffic on ports > 1000 blocked, for security reasons. Contact your local system administrator. Write to archie-group@cc.mcgill.ca with questions about Archie itself. Write to info-prospero@isi.edu about the Prospero protocol. Write to brendan@cygnus.com with questions about this specific package.
