ftp.digital.com Archive Usage and Contents

Introduction

The FTP archive on ftp.digital.com is a supported service of Compaq Computer Corporation's North East Internet Infrastructure Services group. Use entirely at your own risk - no warranty is expressed or implied. Complaints and questions about its operation should be sent to ISOInfrastructureServicesNE@compaq.com .

The archive on ftp.digital.com contains many of the commercially available files provided to the Internet by Compaq. It consists of over 20 gigabytes of information organized as about 100 separate directories. The archive physically resides at Compaq's North East Internet Data Center in Littleton, Massachusetts.

You can retrieve files from ftp.digital.com using either FTP or HTTP.

FTP Access

Connect to ftp.digital.com with your local FTP command. Login as user anonymous, and use your email address as the password. Below is a typical anonymous FTP login example. (Case doesn't matter, uppercase is used here for illustration.)

% ftp ftp.digital.com
Connected to ftp.digital.com.

[ message of the day text deleted, but please read it ]

220 ftp.digital.com FTP server (Version wu-2.6.1(1) Fri Jul 7) 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.

World Wide Web Access

The ftp.digital.com home page is at URL:

http://ftp.digital.com/

Once there, just point and click.

Getting Started

Our public domain archives reside in the /pub directory. We provide index files in / to help you find what you're looking for; they include:

        Index-byname    index in name order (about 23MB)
        Index-byname.Z  compressed (about 4MB)
        Index-bytime    index in time order, newest first (about 23MB)
        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 our Archive Index search page at:

http://ftp.digital.com/cgi-bin/grep-index

Or, you can use our extended site command index to search the index via FTP, for example:

    ftp> quote site exec index emacs

(The truncation after 20 lines is a feature, not a bug.)

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.

The .z suffix on a file implies compression with the gzip program. gzip is the prefered compression format of the Free Software Foundation.

Navigation

Finding something in the archive is a process of exploration. The archive is organized as a hierarchy of files, with / as the top level with most of the files located in /pub/DEC. Below /pub/DEC are a number of subdirectories. Later in this document are partial directory listings showing what sorts of files are available, but for now lets go through an example of how to find something.

The first step would be to list out the directory /. The precise format of the listing would be different for VMS and Unix users, and the files might be slightly different because the archive gets updated. But the list should be similar to:

00README-Legal-Rules-Regs       contrib
GATEWAY.DOC                     dev
GATEWAY.DOC;1                   etc
GATEWAY.PS                      gatekeeper.home.html
Index-byname                    gateway.doc
Index-byname.Z                  gateway.ps
Index-bytime                    home.html
Index-bytime.Z                  hypertext
README.ftp                      index.html
README.nfs                      privat
US-Legal-Regs-ITAR-NOTICE       pub
archive                         quota.group
archive.doc                     quota.user
bin                             rom

This concludes the instructions on how to use the archive, except for FTPmail access which is the last section (it's rather long). 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 daily, so you'll have to access it directly to get up-to-date directory listings.

Index Of Top-level Files

The top-level of the hierarchy contains:

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
Index-explain   -- Description of the index
Index-explain.Z -- Compressed version
README.ftp      -- This file
README.nfs      -- Instructions for NFS mounting the archive
archive.doc     -- Overview and usage guide for the archive
bin/            -- Private directory used by the FTP program
dev/            -- Private directory used by the FTP program
etc/            -- Private directory used by the FTP program
hypertext       -- Private directory used by the archive administrators
private/        -- Private directory used by the archive administrators
pub/            -- Public directory containing the archive files

The only interesting subdirectory here is pub

/pub contains:

DEC/            -- DEC-related files

Below most of these directories are subdirectories that organize the material further.

Alpha -- Compaq Alpha firmware and other support files and docs. DECinfo -- DEC information regarding alpha IAS -- Tools, such as TCPwrapper, Perl, tcltk and others. Linux-Alpha -- Linux Alpha distributions. Linux-Alpha-Tools -- Linux Alpha Tools collect -- Collect agents and documentation y2k -- Y2K information.

ftp.digital.com Archive Administrators
ISOInfrastructureServicesNE@compaq.com

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