Re: archie wais server - WWW access directly to files
Tim Berners-Lee (timbl)
Tue, 18 Feb 92 14:25:04 GMT+0100
Date: Tue, 18 Feb 92 14:25:04 GMT+0100
From: timbl (Tim Berners-Lee)
Message-Id: <9202181325.AA19967@ nxoc01.cern.ch >
To: kean@talon.ucs.orst.edu
Subject: Re: archie wais server - WWW access directly to files
Cc: wais-talk@think.com, www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
> If there's no improvement to the disk space used by these I'll announce the
> server to the world Wednesday morning in alt.wais and the archie-people mailing
> list.
Magic -- I really like it. I have modified the WAIS-WWW gateway so that is the
database is an archie one (i.e.database name contains "archie" :-| ) a W3 search of
the database will give links directly to the files. This relies on the headline
starting with host:/filename.
For the first test I ran www, followed a pointer to your archie server, looked for
"html" to find any hypertext files out there. At the bottom of the list is a file
of Ed Vielmetti's "archie.html" in Toronto. Jumped over there.. it has a pointer
to the comp.archives newgroup ... jumped into the newsgroup... jumped into an
article... This is how things SHOULD work!
Now the things which need neatening up. The gateway I was using is here in CERN,
and the server is at ordst.edu. This implies a transatlantic link for every search.
- Would you or anyone like to run the gateway locally? Volunteers?
- Perhaps we should run the WAIS archie here, mirroring files.
- One of us could run a direct W3 archie server rather than using a gateway
process.
To use www as an archie client,
setenv WWW_wais_GATE http://info.cern.ch:8001/
(or point to a more local gateway!) and
alias archie www wais://archive.orst.edu:9000/archie-orst.edu
I've put a pointer to the archie index in our CERN home page, but not publicised it
yet.
Tim BL