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Pure Bollocks Issue 22_040
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* H O W * T O . . . *
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...use JANET, INTERNET, and FTP to get files!
... With the help of this great article by Robo! Thanks a lot! Myself, Genie,
and other members of Network Trash including Davros, Magic rat and Banana Hand
have found this article very useful. If you're just starting out with academic
networks on shitty PCs, then you might also be intrested in my article, which
is a complete lamers guide to downloading stuff off HENSA. (Well, I was a lamer
on the PC when I first tried to download stuff off them!) Sorry for making your
text file all nice and justified, (I know you really don't like it!) but I had
to fit into the "house style"!!!
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A G U I D E T O J A N E T A N D T H E I N T E R N E T
1. Introduction
Most UK universities and several colleges offer access to the Joint Academic
Network, or JANET for short, either directly from terminals or through a local
computer. Access is made via a PAD (Packet Assembler/Disassembler). Some
institutions may have terminals hooked up to the PAD, some have PCs running
terminal emulation software and some may be connected to a PACX (Private
Automated Computer eXchange). In the latter case, try 25 (for the X25
protocol) when asked to "enter class". If there are PCs (possibly in
University libraries), look around for instructions!
If you need to go through a local computer, try commands such as "pad", "cpad"
or "spad". If you're really lucky, you can get direct access to the Internet
with the "telnet" command although I'll come back to that later. And if you
find a PAD or PACX offering direct Internet access, I wanna know!
A further possibility is that you may have to go through some kind of terminal
server. "help" is usually a good place to start.
So you've got a PAD prompt of some description. What now?
PADs are notoriously unfriendly, so don't expect too much in the way of online
help, although "help address" will tell you all the hosts you can connect to.
None of the following commands is guaranteed to work on your PAD, although the
actual commands should not be too different.
"logon foo bar" will try to log you on as user "foo" with password "bar". All
this appears to do is stop you being logged off after one call, as the password
is (in my experience) completely ignored. "logon foo bar" would probably work,
in fact. "logon p p" was on a list of instructions I once saw. Note that this
command may not be implemented at all.
"call foobar" will call up the host named "foobar". This will usually be one
of the hosts listed by the "help address" command.
"logoff" will log you off. This is the only way to quit after having entered
the "logon" command.
2. Hosts
It has to be said that most of the hosts you can call are dull in the extreme:
other universities' computers (account required) or libraries. A handful offer
useful facilities, and the purpose of this guide is to list some of them.
If the call clears straight away - you will get a message of the form "Cleared
- 0000" - either the host is down or there are communications problems.
2.1. HENSA
HENSA is the Higher Education National Software Archive. This is basically a
PD/shareware archive with a mammoth collection of software, which tends to be
mainly "sensible" in nature (ie not many games) but is certainly worth a visit.
The actual name of this service varies from PAD to PAD, but it usually called
up with "call lancs.pdsoft". Give "hensa" as login name and password.
HENSA's command line interface is based on Unix. Use "cd micros/atari/tos" to
change to the ST directory, then "more index" to page through the index, or
"cat index" if you want to capture the index to a file. (You could transfer it
with Kermit, but I always capture and then clean it up later.) The first couple
of pages in the index tell you just about all you need to know to extract the
actual software from its archived, uuencoded form. Basically, if you are
interested in the package with index number "m123", you would enter "cd
m/m123". "ls -l" lists the files in that directory, and you can "more" the
documentation file for a fuller description of the package. I would then start
the text capture and enter "cat *.uue". To return to the directory containing
the index, enter "cd ../.." (remembering to switch capture off first, of
course).
A preferable method of grabbing software is to use NIFTP on your local machine.
On Unix machines, the command is possibly "cpf" or "hhcp" (try "man -k NIFTP"
to find out for sure). See the appropriate manual pages for more details.
Under VMS, the command may be "transfer".
2.2. NISS
NISS offers several services, the most useful of which may be the computing
vacancies bulletin board. It also provides a restricted gateway to other
hosts, which may occasionally be useful in the event of communications problems
between your local host and the remote host. Enter "call niss" and follow the
on-screen instructions.
2.3. Guest FTP
Now we're talking. This is a service run by the University of London's
Computer Centre. These lucky folk have a direct connection to the Internet and
very kindly provide a transatlantic file transfer service. However, you need
to have a local host in order to get your hands on anything you manage to
transfer. And as more and more institutions are being hooked up to the
Internet, you may find the next paragraph redundant.
Enter "call nsf.sun". If this isn't recognised, try "call j.000040010180". (If
this fails too, you may be able to go through NISS.) Then login as "guestftp"
with password "guestftp". Now, after specifying the name of your temporary
directory for file transfers, you will have FTP (File Transfer Protocol) access
to anywhere in the world. A full explanation is beyond the scope of this
introduction, but you can have instructions emailed to you with the "getguide"
command.
Enter "ftp" to get the "ftp>" prompt. Now use "open foo.bar.edu" to connect to
the FTP server at site foo.bar.edu. If the site supports it (the useful ones
do), give "anonymous" as your username and your email address as the password.
The best site to try is "atari.archive.umich.edu" (although this is "shadowed"
in the UK - see section 2.4). Last time I looked, the main site for Amiga
stuff was "ab20.larc.nasa.gov" (yes, NASA) which had a load of noisetracker
modules. Other well-known sites are "wuarchive.wustl.edu" and
"mars.ee.msstate.edu".
Note that any files you "get" will be transferred to the temporary directory
and should then be transferred to a local host with NIFTP. (And don't forget
to set binary mode when transferring. However, you can uuencode files on
nsf.sun, in case you need to transfer them to a VAX.) The NIFTP transfer can
be invoked from nsf.sun itself, with the command "push", although it is not
really recommended.
2.4. The UKUUG Archive
The UK Unix Users' Group archive is based at the Imperial College, London. This
site is along the same lines of HENSA, but has a much wider variety of
material. As well as archives of various Usenet newsgroups, it maintains
shadow archives of the more popular FTP sites, such as atari.archive.
Enter "call ic.doc.src" or possibly "call j.00000510200001". This logs you in
to a machine running Unix (surprise surprise). However, it is extremely busy
at most times of the day and may take an age to do anything.
Assorted documentation is in the root directory, and there is a lot to explore.
The directory "computing/systems/atari/umich/" contains a fairly up-to-date
shadow of atari.archive.umich.edu. Note that all the ST stuff is lharc'ed or
arc'ed (or even zoo'ed), so if you use NIFTP to transfer anything, remember to
specify a binary transfer (e.g. "cpf -b", I think).
2.5. Guest Telnet
This site is along the same lines of the Guest FTP service. The difference is
that it can get you a login prompt for practically any computer on the
Internet. However, a site's usefulness is often inversely proportional to its
Mean Time To Failure and Guest Telnet is no exception! If your local system
lets you "telnet" to anywhere on the Internet, you can skip the next paragraph.
Enter "call nsfnet-relay.telnet". If that doesn't work, try "call nsf.tn".
Last resort is "call j.00004001018057". Final last resort is to go through
NISS. If you get a connection, there is no need to login - you go straight to
the Guest Telnet prompt, at which you are expected to type the full address of
a host. The service is restricted in at least two ways: firstly, you cannot
specify a port number to telnet to - you will always be connected to port 23
(login). So, no direct telnet'ing to MUDs or IRC (Internet Relay Chat).
Secondly, several more interesting sites are classified as BBSes (Bulletin
Board Servers) and are unavailable before 7pm. I am pretty sure that they
monitor which sites are being connected to (this applies to the Guest FTP
service too) and check out the busier ones to see whether or not they should be
put on the daytime blacklist. This might seem cruel but an awful lot of
traffic does go through this site.
A fairly recent development on the Internet has been the gopher. This is
basically an information server. The information held on a gopher can be
anything at all - jokes, recipes, papers on aspects of computing - but gophers
can also connect to other gophers, sites on the Internet or even BBSes. I am
assured there is even a gopher which connects you to a modem, allowing you to
make a local call within Miami, Florida. (Local calls are free in most parts
of the USA.) The client/server nature of gophers is what makes them extremely
powerful.
Try connecting to "134.84.132.4" (aka "hafnhaf.micro.umn.edu", at the
University of Minnesota), logging in as "gopher". Alternatively, try
"129.16.221.40" (aka "gopher.chalmers.se", in Sweden). Chalmers lets you get
to interesting places by connecting to UMN so should normally only be used when
normal connection to UMN is impossible (i.e. transatlantic comms problems).
After entering your terminal type, you will be presented with a series of
menus. The first option you choose would normally be something along the lines
of "Other Gophers/Information Servers". Then you will be allowed to narrow the
search down to a particular geographical region - a favourite path is "North
America", then "USA", then a particular state or "All" for a list of all the
possible connections. There's nothing to stop you having a good look around -
after all, if these folk didn't expect people to call up their gophers or
information servers, they wouldn't be on another gopher's menu. And if you get
a connection to a BBS you want to revisit, take a note of its address (the
sequence of four numbers or words, separated by dots) which comes up on the
screen at the start of the session. You can then use this address in future
instead of "134.84.132.4" to connect directly, without having to go through the
gopher. Assuming, of course, that it isn't on the daytime blacklist.
3. And Finally
Try not to use this information to go hacking across JANET or the Internet!
(Anyway, if you were likely to do that sort of thing, you'd probably have
worked all the above out for yourself long ago.) Abuse It And Lose It is the
normal scheme of things. Over the past year, at least two major BBSes were
closed down or severely restricted by their operators because some clown
managed to hack the BBS software and get unlimited access.
Questions (try "help" first though!), comments, or addresses of FTP sites with
large collections of "special interest" GIFs (: [<- That funny sign is a grin,
by the way, it's used a lot in comms talk! -EGBSS] can be emailed to
an8016@anon.penet.fi
or possibly
an8016%anon.penet.fi@uunet.uu.net
Note that sending email to this address will automatically generate an
anonymous ID for yourself. The email will also be "anonymised".
robo
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