Surfing the Internet | Page 5

anonymous ftp archive sites, the archie service
is now being expanded to
include a variety of other online directories and
resource listings."

"Currently, archie tracks the contents of over
800 anonymous FTP archive
sites containing some 1,000,000 files throughout
the Internet. Collectively,
these files represent well over 50 Gigabytes
(50,000,000,000 bytes) of
information, with additional information being
added daily. Anonymous ftp
archive sites offer software, data and other
information which can be
copied and used without charge by anyone with
connection to the Internet."

"The archie server automatically updates the
listing information from each
site about once a month, ensuring users that the
information they receive
is reasonably timely, without imposing an undue
load on the archive sites
or network bandwidth."

Unfortunately the archie server at McGill is
currently out of service.
Other sites are:
archie.ans.net (USA [NY])
archie.rutgers.edu (USA [NJ])
archie.sura.net (USA [MD])
archie.funet.fi (Finland/Mainland Europe)
archie.au (Australia/New Zealand)
archie.doc.ic.ac.uk (Great Britain/Ireland)

More information avaiable from:
UNIX Support Group
Computing Centre
McGill University

Room 200
Burnside Hall
805 Sherbrooke Street West
Montreal, Quebec CANADA H3A 2K6
514/398-3709
[email protected]


Internet Gopher
Gopher (or go-fer): someone who fetches
necessary items from many locations.

Login as gopher after you telnet to
consultant.micro.umn.edu and enjoy
having a computer do all the work for you. Almost.
Gopher is still in
experimental mode at many gopherized sites.
Still, it is one of the best
ways to locate information on and in the Internet.

Besides archie, the gopher at
consultant.micro.umn.edu includes fun and
games, humor, libraries (including reference
books such as the Hacker's
Dictionary, Roget's 1911 Thesaurus, and the CIA
World Fact Book), gateways
t o other US and foreign gophers, news, and gateways
to other systems.

VERONICA: Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide
Index to Computerized Archives.

Very new on the scene is VERONICA.
Here is some information from Steve Foster about
it.

"Veronica offers a keyword search of most
gopher-server menus in the entire
gopher web. As Archie is to ftp archives,
Veronica is to gopherspace.
Unlike Archie, the search results can connect you
directly to the data source.
Imagine an Archie search that lets you select the

data, not just the host
sites, directly from a menu. Because Veronica
is accessed through a gopher
client, it is easy to use, and gives access to
all types of data supported
by the gopher protocol."

"Veronica was designed as a response to the problem
of resource discovery
i n the rapidly-expanding gopher web. Frustrated
comments in the net news-
groups have recently reflected the need for such
a service. Additional
motivation came from the comments of naive gopher
users, several of
whom assumed that a simple-touse service would
provide a means to find
resources `without having to know where they
are.'"

"The result of a Veronica search is an
automatically-generated gopher
menu, customized according to the user's keyword
specification. Items on
this menu may be drawn from many gopher servers.
These are functional