From: peterd@cc.mcgill.ca (Peter Deutsch)
Subject: Re: gopher sites, IP addresses
Organization: McGill University Computing Centre
Distribution: na
Date: Wed, 8 Apr 1992 02:15:02 GMT

g'day,

Hmmm, it look slike this didn't make it out the first time. Apologies
to those that will get this twice...

I am responding to Mark Strom's question about finding a 
way to locate Gopher servers on the net. We are working on a
generalized solution to this problem as part of our follow-on
work to archie. I'm cross-posting this to comp.archives.admin, since
this is a solution to a general resource discovery problem of interest
to that audience, as well.


Mark Strom writes
> We have gopher clients installed on pc's, mac's, and unix mainframes.   
Is
> there any way to obtain gopher server names/IP numbers, other than by  
looking
> at the "About This Gopher" files that are present at some sites, but  
not
> at others?  It would be nice to be able to point/connect directly to  
certain
> gophers that have useful services (like ftp searches), but for a few  
of these,
> (like U. Notre Dame), I haven't been able to locate the name/IP of  
the server.


We are currently well on the way with the next release of archie.
One of the principal improvements we are planning is to extend the
data gathering model to allow tracking of arbitrary types of 
information (using a scripting mechanism). Once this is working we
plan to deploy an archie-like  server specifically to track network
information service providers. This is something we've been calling
a "Resource Information Server", or RIS.

The idea is to allow Internet service providers to register with
the RIS server, preferably via email. The server would verify that
the service exists and then start tracking, periodically returning
as we do now with archive sites to ensure that the service has not
gone away. We allow users to search these descriptions on the various
fields and as long as we can verify a service exists, we will tell
users about it.

Note that this is a more ambitious and generalized plan than
simply tracking Gopher sites. We also expect to track WAIS servers,
archie servers and anon FTP archives, among other things.

Currently we see the registration taking the form:

	Service Type:
	DNS name:
	IP address:
	Abstract :


Thus, the entry for our own archie server would look like:

	Service Type:	archie
	DNS name:	archie.mcgill.ca
	IP address:	132.206.2.3
	Abstract:	This is the pilot archie server operated
			by the archie development group. It is
			a general purpose index of the available
			UNIX-based anonymous FTP archive sites.


While I've got your attention, I should mention that because the next
release of archie will support generalized data gathering, we expect
to see specialized data-gathering indexers for a variety of
subjects come on-line. Thus, we might see indexers that gather
information about email mailing lists, on-line library catalogues,
Usenet archives, etc.

Once this is deployed you would be able to connect to the mailing
list indexer and search descriptions for mailing lists that are of
interest, or search the Usenet archivers for the sites that are
archiving your favorite newsgroups. Of course, we would expect to see
these various services registered in the RIS, as well.

If we are right and a number of such services are deployed, we
will definitely need the generalized RIS tool to locate the various
indexing services of interest. This is a rather ambitious plan, and
we don't expect it to deploy overnight, but hopefully we'll have some
of the tools in place in the next couple of months.


Now, a couple of caveats. We don't yet have any sites lined up to 
run all of these services, but hey that hasn't stopped us before. :-)
I suspect that we will offer a couple to get things started and
interested sites will pick up on the idea, as they did with archie.

Also, we do expect to be charging a "reasonable" fee to license the
server software, so before  you think of volunteering be aware that
there will be a modest charge to get access to the archie code starting
with this next release.

I'm really sorry that we have to do this, but we've received little
institutional support to date and there's real pressure on us to get
some cash in to pay for our resources. We'll distribute details to 
interested parties when we get closer to general release. Note: this
is NOT an advertisement for our service, and we are not soliciting
clients. I'm merely trying to let people know what's coming.

The timetable? We hope to have archie 3.0 in beta by the end of 
April, with general release hopefully no later than about June.
Actually deployment of additional services would then follow.

As usual, input from the user community on what we are doing
is welcomed and should be sent to "archie-group@cc.mcgill.ca".
We sometimes take a while to respond, be we read all mail as it
comes in...


				- peterd