🚀 go-pugleaf

In other articles people have complained about the ping time to the US & it has
been stated that the cause is basically the amount of ftp traffic. (and the fact
that archie archives are out of date...)

I would not mind betting that the following is what the majority of archie
users do... (despite there being better tools available)

$ archie
NOTE: THIS IS VERSION 2.1 OF ARCHIE
      VERSION 3.0 is CURRENLY IN ALPHA TEST. SHOULD BE RELEASED
      TO THE WORLD IN A MONTH OR SO.

YOU ARE RUNNING ON ARCHIE.AU (sometimes known as plaza.aarnet.EDU.AU)

If you have any problems with archie, send mail to ccw@archie.au

This machine is a brand spanking new SparcStation 2 purchased by
AARNet funds to further serve the AARNet community. The machine lives 
directly on the AARNet backbone so should provide excellent
connectivity to all points of AARNet.

archie> prog whatever

[here archie grinds away then outputs ~30 pages of ftp sites & files]
[the user only sees the last few on screen & ftp's to one of those]

This scenario (apart from the warm feeling it gives the user to know that
archie is a "brand spanking new SparcStation 2 purchased by AARNet funds to
further serve the AARNet community") is bound to cause ftp traffic on the
US link that really should not be there.

A solution, according to the archie documentation is that you should be able to
"page" the output from archie (this should perhaps be the default). However
this does not work. PLEASE FIX THIS PROBLEM ! and the US ftp traffic may show
a decline.

Another enhancement to archie would be to find database hits but only present
those that can be found in the top (or even decending) domain of the users
machine.

(do I need to send mail to ccw@archie.au about these ? or is the real
person behind ccw@archie.au listening ?)

Also, in a recent article Geoff Huston wrote:
>shadowing works if you have the diskspace - and archie is running
>pretty much to the brim :-(

Then have a "find" script that removes things that have not been accessed for
say 6 months ! (or whatever is a convenient period) you may be surprised how
much disk space this free's & the fact that it is no longer on archie will
obviously not cause excessive ftp traffic to the US !

Certainly be more selective about what you archive if disk is such a problem.

On the subject of gathering data regarding ftp traffic, surely it would be
useful to be able to justify the disk space used on archie by "profiling"
the ftp program & producing stats that justify the archie disk space verses
US link bandwidth requirements?

johnd@physiol.su.oz.au

PS: perhaps the following (suggested by gtw@plato.su.oz.au) will also reduce
the traffic on the US link, once archie has "up to date" archives...
(bearing in mind that the "most up to date" may only mean that it was recently
copied from elsewhere)

#! /bin/sh
# A _one-line_ script to call up archie, get the list of all files specified
# by the regular expression which is the first argument, sort these files by age
# and display them
echo "prog $1" | rsh archie.au -l archie "" | nawk "/Host/ { host = \$2 } /Last/ { cury = \$6 } /Location:/ { dir = \$2 } /FILE/||/DIRECTORY/ { if (index(\$6,\":\")) year = cury; else year = \$6; printf \"%3s %2s %4s %7s /%s:/%s/%s\\n\",\$4,\$5,year,\$3,host,dir,\$7 } { next }" - | sort +2nr -3 +0Mr -1 +1nr -2 | less