Hitchhikers Guide to the Internet | Page 4

are considered to be the major RFCs necessary for understanding the Internet).

The Network Information Center
The NIC is a facility available to all Internet users which provides information to the community. There are three means of NIC contact: network, telephone, and mail. The network accesses are the most prevalent. Interactive access is frequently used to do queries of NIC service overviews, look up user and host names, and scan lists of NIC documents. It is available by using
%telnet sri-nic.arpa
on a BSD system and following the directions provided by a user friendly prompter. From poking around in the databases provided one might decide that a document named NETINFO:NUG.DOC (The Users Guide to the ARPAnet) would be worth having. It could be retrieved via an anonymous FTP. An anonymous FTP would proceed something like the following. (The dialogue may vary slightly depending on the implementation of FTP you are using).
%ftp sri-nic.arpa Connected to sri-nic.arpa. 220 SRI_NIC.ARPA FTP Server Process 5Z(47)-6 at Wed 17-Jun-87 12:00 PDT Name (sri-nic.arpa:myname): anonymous 331 ANONYMOUS user ok, send real ident as password. Password: myname 230 User ANONYMOUS logged in at Wed 17-Jun-87 12:01 PDT, job 15. ftp> get netinfo:nug.doc 200 Port 18.144 at host 128.174.5.50 accepted. 150 ASCII retrieve of NUG.DOC.11 started. 226 Transfer Completed 157675 (8) bytes transferred local: netinfo:nug.doc remote:netinfo:nug.doc 157675 bytes in 4.5e+02 seconds (0.34 Kbytes/s) ftp> quit 221 QUIT command received. Goodbye.
(Another good initial document to fetch is NETINFO:WHAT-THE-NIC-DOES.TXT)!
Questions of the NIC or problems with services can be asked of or reported to using electronic mail. The following addresses can be used:
[email protected] General user assistance, document requests [email protected] User registration and WHOIS updates [email protected] Hostname and domain changes and updates [email protected] SRI-NIC computer operations [email protected] Comments on NIC publications and services
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For people without network access, or if the number of documents is large, many of the NIC documents are available in printed form for a small charge. One frequently ordered document for starting sites is a compendium of major RFCs. Telephone access is used primarily for questions or problems with network access. (See appendix B for mail/telephone contact numbers).

The NSFnet Network Service Center
The NSFnet Network Service Center (NNSC) is funded by NSF to provide a first level of aid to users of NSFnet should they have questions or encounter problems traversing the network. It is run by BBN Inc. Karen Roubicek ([email protected]) is the NNSC user liaison.
The NNSC, which currently has information and documents online and in printed form, plans to distribute news through network mailing lists, bulletins, newsletters, and online reports. The NNSC also maintains a database of contact points and sources of additional information about NSFnet component networks and supercomputer centers.
Prospective or current users who do not know whom to call concerning questions about NSFnet use, should contact the NNSC. The NNSC will answer general questions, and, for detailed information relating to specific components of the Internet, will help users find the appropriate contact for further assistance. (Appendix B)

Mail Reflectors
The way most people keep up to date on network news is through subscription to a number of mail reflectors. Mail reflectors are special electronic mailboxes which, when they receive a message, resend it to a list of other mailboxes. This in effect creates a discussion group on a particular topic. Each subscriber sees all the mail forwarded by the reflector, and if one wants to put his "two cents" in sends a message with the comments to the reflector....
The general format to subscribe to a mail list is to find the address reflector and append the string -REQUEST to the mailbox name (not the host name). For example, if you wanted to take part in the mailing list for NSFnet reflected by [email protected], one sends a request to
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[email protected]. This may be a wonderful scheme, but the problem is that you must know the list exists in the first place. It is suggested that, if you are interested, you read the mail from one list (like NSFNET) and you will probably become familiar with the existence of others. A registration service for mail reflectors is provided by the NIC in the files NETINFO:INTEREST-GROUPS-1.TXT, NETINFO:INTEREST-GROUPS-2.TXT, and NETINFO:INTEREST-GROUPS- 3.TXT.
The NSFNET mail reflector is targeted at those people who have a day to day interest in the news of the NSFnet (the backbone, regional network, and Internet inter-connection site workers). The messages are reflected by a central location and are sent as separate messages to each subscriber. This creates hundreds of messages on the wide area networks where bandwidth is the scarcest.
There are two ways in which a campus could spread the news and not cause these messages to inundate the wide area networks. One is to re-reflect the message on the campus. That is, set up a reflector on a local machine which forwards the message to a campus distribution list. The other is to