Zen and the Art of Internet | Page 8

to be added to or deleted from the Sun Managers list should be sent to [email protected].
When in doubt, try to write to the -request version of a mailing list address first; the other people on the list aren't interested in your desire to be added or deleted, and can certainly do nothing to expedite your request. Often if the administrator of a list is busy (remember, this is all peripheral to real jobs and real work), many users find it necessary to ask again and again, often with harsher and harsher language, to be removed from a list. This does nothing more than waste traffic and bother everyone else receiving the messages. If, after a reasonable amount of time, you still haven't succeeded to be removed from a mailing list, write to the postmaster at that site and see if they can help.
Exercise caution when replying to a message sent by a mailing list. If you wish to respond to the author only, make sure that the only address you're replying to is that person, and not the entire list. Often messages of the sort ``Yes, I agree with you completely!'' will appear on a list, boring the daylights out of the other readers. Likewise, if you explicitly do want to send the message to the whole list, you'll save yourself some time by checking to make sure it's indeed headed to the whole list and not a single person.
A list of the currently available mailing lists is available in at least two places; the first is in a file on ftp.nisc.sri.com called interest-groups under the netinfo/ directory. It's updated fairly regularly, but is large (presently around 700K), so only get it every once in a while. The other list is maintained by Gene Spafford ([email protected]), and is posted in parts to the newsgroup news.lists semi-regularly. (Usenet News, for info on how to read that and other newsgroups.)
Listservs
On BITNET there's an automated system for maintaining discussion lists called the listserv. Rather than have an already harried and overworked human take care of additions and removals from a list, a program performs these and other tasks by responding to a set of user-driven commands.
Areas of interest are wide and varied---ETHICS-L deals with ethics in computing, while ADND-L has to do with a role-playing game. A full list of the available BITNET lists can be obtained by writing to [email protected] with a body containing the command
list global
However, be sparing in your use of this---see if it's already on your system somewhere. The reply is quite large.
The most fundamental command is subscribe. It will tell the listserv to add the sender to a specific list. The usage is
subscribe foo-l Your Real Name
It will respond with a message either saying that you've been added to the list, or that the request has been passed on to the system on which the list is actually maintained.
The mate to subscribe is, naturally, unsubscribe. It will remove a given address from a BITNET list. It, along with all other listserv commands, can be abbreviated---subscribe as sub, unsubscribe as unsub, etc. For a full list of the available listserv commands, write to [email protected], giving it the command help.
As an aside, there have been implementations of the listserv system for non-BITNET hosts (more specifically, Unix systems). One of the most complete is available on cs.bu.edu in the directory pub/listserv.
``I made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter.'' Pascal, Provincial Letters XVI
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Anonymous FTP
FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is the primary method of transferring files over the Internet. On many systems, it's also the name of the program that implements the protocol. Given proper permission, it's possible to copy a file from a computer in South Africa to one in Los Angeles at very fast speeds (on the order of 5--10K per second). This normally requires either a user id on both systems or a special configuration set up by the system administrator(s).
There is a good way around this restriction---the anonymous FTP service. It essentially will let anyone in the world have access to a certain area of disk space in a non-threatening way. With this, people can make files publicly available with little hassle. Some systems have dedicated entire disks or even entire computers to maintaining extensive archives of source code and information. They include gatekeeper.dec.com (Digital), wuarchive.wustl.edu (Washington University in Saint Louis), and archive.cis.ohio-state.edu (The Ohio State University).
The process involves the ``foreign'' user (someone not on the system itself) creating an FTP connection and logging into the system as the user anonymous, with an arbitrary password:
Name (foo.site.com:you): anonymous Password: [email protected]
Custom and netiquette dictate that people respond to the Password: query with an email address so that the sites can track the level of FTP usage, if they desire. (Addresses for information on email