🚀 go-pugleaf

In <matth.732433404@extro.ucc.su.OZ.AU>
matth@extro.ucc.su.OZ.AU (Matthew Hannigan) writes:

| kre@munnari.OZ.AU (Robert Elz) writes:
| >What's more, if a file is not actually there in the regular mirrors,
| >you can always have archie.au fetch it for you, and cache the result so
| >should anyone else want the same file it doesn't need to be transferred
| >over the US link again.

| How does one do this? (Have something cahed at archie.au)

I did mean to actually explain in my message, and its been pointed out
several times that I should have ...

First, note that this stuff is experimental, and is not guaranteed to
always be working.

The mechanism is to look in /alex on archie.au - in there you will
find directories named after top level domains, inside each (most)
of those you'll find directories named after sub-domains, and so on
until you find directories named after hosts.  (Caution: some domains
are hosts, which contain files, but which also have sub-domains).
Note that just doing "ls" doesn't necessarily show everything available
at this level, only hosts and domains that have either been referenced
before, or have been pre-wired into the cache.   You can just try a "cd"
to a path name that doesn't exist to add new domains or directories
(assuming that the host or domain actually exists).   Also note that
brousing around here can be very slow, you're always almost much better
off simply taking the host name that you want to access, reversing the
domains (ala JANET), and replacing all dots ('.') with slashes ('/')
so as to make a normal looking unix path-name, then cd to that - directly
to the host name in one step.   (eg: "cd /alex/au/oz/munnari" if you
wanted to fetch files from munnari.oz.au - however please avoid fetching
files from inside Australia this way, conserve cache space for foreign
based files - also check that archie.au doesn't have a copy of the file
in one of its normal mirror areas, and fetch from there if it does).

Once you're in the host directory, you're effectively at the root of
that host's anonymous ftp area, and you can cd down into it just as
if you had ftp'd to that host - if the directories already exist on
archie.au this will be quick, if they don't, archie.au will need to
ftp to the host you're accessing to obtain the details, which can make
operations that seem as if they should be quick take a bit longer than
you might expect (but just once).

You fetch files in the normal ftp way - alex will check to see that the
file isn't out of date if it has a copy in its cache, or it will fetch
the file to its cache if it wasn't there - also note that this will cause
a delay as (I think) the file won't start to be sent back to you until
the whole thing has reached archie.au, so for big files you can expect
a lengthy delay after "get'until bytes start appearing - but once they
do they'll be coming just from archie.au, so should be much faster than
fetching from overseas.

I've never tried it, but I rather doubt that this will work if the
destination ftp site isn't a (normal kind of) unix server.

Again, please note, this is experimental, its possible that it won't
always be available at all (if /alex is empty, the alex server isn't
running on archie.au) and its also possible that it won't always work
perfectly.  Alex also has limits on how many ftp's it will attempt
simultaneously, if that limit is exceeded, later ftp attempts will
simply hang.

kre