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Archie: Finding files on anoymous FTP servers world-wide
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SWITCH offers a new value added service to its customers:

		The SWITCH Archie Service on
		     archie.switch.ch.

This is a complementary service to the SWITCHinfo file server
which offers now more than 100'000 files with an accumulated
size of more than 7 GBytes.

More than 1000 anonymous FTP archive servers are available on the
Internet. Each of them stores a few up to many thousand files. A user
looking for a software package or some documentation is mostly
confronted with the problem to look for a needle in the haystack.
  In a first attempt one might look for a reference in a suitable
Usenet News group or consult a list of anonymous FTP servers.
A much better approach became popular in the recent years.
Ask Archie! This is not a bright guy knowing everything, it is a
service with a list of anonymous FTP servers together with a
database of their files. Archie was designed and implemented by
Peter Deutsch and Alan Emtage from the McGill University, Montreal.

A user sends a query to a nearby Archie server by specifying a
filename (or a part of it). As a result the Archie server returns
a list of FTP servers together with the matching files including
the size, date of last modification and the path. The user will
then have to decide from where to retrieve the file. A user will
prefer to get the most up-to-date version of the file as fast as
possible (see the "Getting Started with Archie" section below).

To send a query, a user needs either a local archie client
(available on most platforms), uses the user friendly Gopher service
or establishes a Telnet connection to the Archie server - under
the loginname 'archie' with no password is a public client available.

One of the best local clients is currently X-Archie 2.0.9 using
the X Window System. With a click of a button, a user can fetch
the desired file from the anonymous FTP server.

Up to now, an Archie server used to collect its knowledge directly
from all the FTP servers it kept track of. The more Archie servers
were installed, the less did this approach scale. It spoilt both
network resources and computing resources of the FTP servers queried.
  Bunyip Information Systems, Montreal, Canada, developed a new
generation of Archie 3 servers. Such a server is part of an Archie
information exchange network. It directly collects the data from
the FTP servers in its area and distributes it in a preprocessed
format to the other Archie 3 servers all over the world. Updates
are applied about once a week, important FTP servers more often.
  The SWITCH Archie server maintains a database about nearly
800 FTP servers with a total of more than 4.2 million files. It
currently exchanges data with servers in Austria, Canada, Germany,
Israel, Italy, Sweden, UK and the USA. Data from Australia, Japan,
Korea, Singapore and Taiwan is relayed through a server on the
East coast of the USA.

Archie Clients
--------------
Users will mostly have no problems in using Archie 3 server, even
all currently available client implementations are written for
the older generation of servers. It may happen that not all possible
matches get reported by the client. In the next weeks and months
updates of these clients are due, watch out for them!
  There exists a patch for clients written in C, it corrects a bug
in older Archie clients which has not been noticed when using old
servers. It can be retrieved from SWITCHinfo (nic.switch.ch) in
the directory /software/sources/archie. At the same place you can
find many Archie clients.

Future Developments
-------------------
The new generation of Archie server offers many new possibilities
not yet supported by the clients.
 - Searching for filenames only will improve the search speed, a
   follow up search will then list the additional information for
   the most interesting files.
 - Pathname restricted searches where the query contains besides
   the file name also a possible part of the pathname will help
   in improving the quality of the answers, provided the pathnames
   chosen by the archive administrators are sensible.
 - Domain-constrained searches will help to find files on nearby
   FTP servers.

A modulare design of the new Archie database makes future extensions
possible. An important one will be a database of a more detailed
description of software packages as defined by the IETF Internet
Anonymous FTP Archives (IAFA) working group. An extension to the
WAIS and Gopher services is also likely.

Getting Started with Archie and Anonymous FTP
---------------------------------------------
 - Configure the server archie.switch.ch in your local Archie client
   or use telnet archie.switch.ch with the login name 'archie'.

 - Compose your query. This heavily depends on the kind of client you
   use. Most clients have an on-line help facility. Use substring
   search or case insensitive search method when appropriate.

 - You will prefer to get the most up-to-date version of file.
   This is, however, not always the file with the most recent
   modification date. The reason for that is, that not all sites
   having copies of a file reset the date of the files to the
   original modification date. To be sure, compare also the size
   and the exact name of the files you got as result of your search.

 - When the file to be retrieved is available on multiple FTP severs,
   chose one geographically nearby you have access to.

 - When retrieving files check the welcome pages of the FTP servers.
   They contain information such as preferred hours of use, copyright
   messages or acceptable use statements.

 - Remember to use the binary option when transferring non ASCII files.


The SWITCH Archie service is available to everybody according to the
following Acceptable Use Statement:

      ***  Access to this Archie service is exclusively allowed for  ***
      ***  - Swiss universities, schools & organisations with a      ***
      ***    SWITCH service contract                                 ***
      ***  - foreign education & research organisations              ***

===============================================================================
               SWITCH - The Swiss Academic and Research Network
   Thomas Lenggenhager, SWITCH, Limmatquai 138, CH-8001 Zurich, Switzerland
   INET: lenggenhager@switch.ch | Tel: +41 1 268 1540 | Fax: +41 1 268 1568
      X.400: G=thomas; S=lenggenhager; O=switch; P=switch; A=arcom; C=ch;