The archive on ftp.zx.net.nz contains mostly data available elsewhere on the internet - normally it is just mirrored here for convenience. It consists of over 900 gigabytes of information organized in thousands separate directories.
You can retrieve files from ftp.zx.net.nz using either FTP or HTTP.
Please do not mirror large amounts of data from the FTP Archive on ftp.zx.net.nz without getting in touch first. This system has limited resources (its on a residential internet connection) and its probably on the opposite side of the world from you - there may be other more convenient sources with better bandwidth for portions of the archive. If you must mirror, try to limit traffic between 8AM and 11PM NZ time. With wget you can insert a random delay between each request using --random-wait for example.
% ftp ftp.zx.net.nz Connected to ftp.zx.net.nz. [ message of the day text deleted, but please read it ] 220 ftp.zx.net.nz FTP server ready. Name (myname): ANONYMOUS 331 Guest login ok, send ident as password. Password: MYNAME@MYMACHINE.MYDOMAIN 230 Guest login ok, access restrictions apply. ftp>Use the cd command to move between directories; the ls command to list directory contents; and, the get command to retrieve files.
Once there, just point and click.
Index-byname index in name order (about 30MB)
Index-byname.Z compressed (about 4MB)
Index-bytime index in time order, newest first (about 30MB)
Index-bytime.Z compressed (about 4MB)
These indexes are BIG, even when compressed. If you have access
to a Web browser, you can search them through the Archive Index search
page at:
http://ftp.zx.net.nz/cgi-bin/grep-index
The .Z suffix on a file implies compression with the /usr/ucb/compress program. This is part of 4.3BSD, Ultrix, Digital UNIX, SunOS, and all other recent versions of UN*X. On linux systems, gzip is able to handle these files, On windows winzip and 7zip work. Sources for compress 4.0 are in /pub/misc/compress-4.0.tar.
The .z suffix on a file implies compression with the gzip program. gzip is the prefered compression format of the Free Software Foundation.
The .bz2 suffix on a file implies compression with the bzip2 program.
Most main directories will contain one of three common files. When present you should always read them. They will help you to find what you seek and provide information on the directory you are looking at. Even if they are out of date they should still be useful. You can tell when the file was last updated by the file modification timestamp or the date present in the file.
These common files are:
index.html -- A HyperText file describing the contents of the directory. If you are accessing the archive from a web browser it may be worth your time looking at these. If not, just ignore them 00-INDEX.TXT -- This is the index for the directory. It should contain some information about some of the more important files in the directory 01-README.TXT -- This file contains important information about the contents of the directory. You should always read this file if it is present.
The remainer of this document attempts to describe the organization of the archive hierarchy and to list some of the top-level files available. The content of the archive changes frequently, so you'll have to access it directly to get up-to-date directory listings.
Index-byname -- Archive index sorted by name Index-byname.Z -- Compressed version Index-bytime -- Archive index sorted by file modification time Index-bytime.Z -- Compressed version README.ftp -- FTP Access notes README.www -- WWW Access notes hypertext -- Private directory used by the web server private/ -- Private directory used by the archive administrator pub/ -- Public directory containing the archive files rom/ -- Public CDROMs
The only interesting subdirectories here are pub and rom
/pub contains:
dev/ -- Software Development tools doc/ -- Various documentation Drivers/ -- Drivers for various computer hardware Game-Files/ -- Free games, patches for games, 3rd party data, etc Hardware/ -- Grouped hardware, documentation and firmware collections Mac/ -- Macintosh stuff Media/linux -- Linux install ISOs (some of these are very out of date) Patches/ -- Mostly Operating System patches archive/ -- archived stuff misc/ -- Misc stuff mirrors/ -- Mirrored data (ftp servers mostly) software/ -- A selection of software for dos/windows, vms, macos, unix, etc usenet/ -- Usenet newsgroup archives
Below most of these directories are subdirectories that organize the material further.
/rom contains a bank of CD-ROM discs. The contents of these directories will vary from time to time and multi-user access will be quite slow.