2222222222 2222222222 2222222222 2222222222 2222 2222 2222 2222222222 2222 2222 2222 222222222222 22222222 2222222222 22222222 222222222222 22222222 2222 2222 2222 22222222 2222 2222 2222 2222 2222 2222 2222 2222 2222 2222 2222 2222222222 2222 2222222222 2222222222 2222 2222 2222222222 2222 2222222222 2222222222 2222 2222 No 22 %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% BIO-NAUT NEWSLETTER 12-2-92 << EDITED BY ROBERT HARPER >> %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% GO FOR IT WITH GOPHER INTRODUCTION. In this edition of BioBit I will take a look a gopher, and will give some examples of its use, using a gopher in Sweden. First of all the name gopher has already caused some confusion. When the newsgroup alt.gopher opened up quite a few people thought it was alt.golfer and were all set to swap stories about golf clubs and sand traps Anyway if one of the best terminal emulations in the world is called KERMIT then perhaps GOPHER will become equally well known. I have no idea why the software should be given this name...could it be the mascot of the University of Minnesota... is it a play on words GOPHER=GO FOR. Basically that is what gopher does, it allows you to go to different places on the network and get information. In the examples below I will show how you can use gopher to run an archie session, look at WWW, even peek into the CONVEX computer here at the Finnish State Computer Centre to see how we have used gopher to help users find out what is on the system. But first things first. GOPHER PHILOSOPHY The Internet Gopher is a distributed document delivery service. It allows a neophyte user to access various types of data residing on multiple hosts in a seamless fashion. This is accomplished by presenting the user a hierarchical arrangement of documents and by using a client-server communications model. In addition to browsing through hierarchies of documents, gopher users can submit queries to gopher search servers. The search servers typically have full-text indexes for a set of gopher documents; the response to a query is a list of documents that matched the search criteria. Internet Gopher servers accept simple queries (sent over a TCP connection), and respond by sending the client a document or a list of documents. Since this is a distributed protocol there can be many servers... but the client software hides this fact from the user. We currently use this technology at the Center for Scientific Computing here in Finland to support users on our CONVEX mainframe. AMERICAN GOPHER CONNECTION Interested folks can try out the curses based UNIX client by opening a telnet session to consultant.micro.umn.edu [128.101.95.23]. Login as gopher with no password. ANONYMOUS FTP SITE FOR GOPHER SOFTWARE All the gopher client and server software is available for anonymous ftp from boombox.micro.umn.edu [128.101.95.95]; look in /pub/gopher. Currently there are gopher clients for Mac, PC and Unix (curses-based) available from the University of Minnesota. Version 1.1 of the PC Gopher client can be obtained by anonymous FTP from boombox.micro.umn.edu in the directory pub/gopher/PC_client/version_1.20 The PC Gopher client runs on most networked PCs, but requires that you have loaded the appropriate Clarkson packet driver for your network ethernet card. The PC gopher software has a TurboVision user interface so both keyboard and mouse are supported... and you don't need to run MS Windows. The University of St. Thomas wrote a NeXT gopher client available for anonymous ftp from cs.stthomas.edu (140.209.5.1) directory gopher, file Gopher_1.0b.tar.Z (51605 bytes). Summary of Internet Gopher Software. Macintosh Gopher client written in HyperCard. Macintosh Gopher Server software. PC Gopher Client with a Borland Turbo Vision Interface. Full Text Indexing servers for NeXT machines. NeXT Gopher client (provided by Max Tardiveau of the University of St. Thomas.) Questions, problems, feedback or bug reports may be directed to the development team at gopher@boombox.micro.umn.edu. MAILING LIST FOR GOPHER NEWS There is a mailing list "gopher-news" where bug fixes are announced or new versions of gopher software. If you would like to subscribe to gopher-news, please send e-mail to gopher-news-request@boombox.micro.umn.edu. OK Now for an example session with a gopher system set up in Sweden To access the system you give the following command. "telnet gopher.sunet.se" and login as gopher sun4 /mnt/home/csc/harper 8> telnet gopher.sunet.se Trying... Connected to sunic.sunet.se. Escape character is '^]'. SunOS UNIX (sunic) login: gopher Internet Gopher v0.5 Copyright 1991 Univ. of Minnesota Root Directory 1. Info about this Gopher Server. 2. Nordic Information Services/ 3. CCITT Blue Book/ 4. Requests for Comments (RFC)/ 5. PD Software FTP Archive/ 6. Internet Libraries/ --> 7. World Wide Web/ 8. Other Gopher and Information Servers/ These examples have been done with the Unix curses-based software. The MAC hypercard stack is a point and click nice visual interface, but since we have to limit ourselves to plain ascii on Usenet then the Unix curses-based style gives the clearest presentation. So you can move with the cursor keys and choose option 7 so you can have a look at WWW down at CERN in Switzerland. You will notice that once you have selected that option there is a symbol directly after it. This means you are about to open up a telnet session to WWW. Internet Gopher v0.5 Copyright 1991 Univ. of Minnesota World Wide Web --> 1. World Wide Web (at CERN) Warning!!!!!, you are about to leave the Internet Gopher program and connect to another host. If you get stuck press the control key and the ] key, and then type quit Now connecting to info.cern.ch Use the account name "www" to log in Press return to connect: After pressing return you get into WWW. WWW is hypertext based software and that lots of numbers are sprinkled thoughout the text. If you choose a number then you are automatically linked to the documents that are hidden behind it. If we chose option 7 then we get into a list of all public CERN news groups. CERN Information CERN is the European Particle Physics Labpratory in Geneva, Switzerland. Select by number information here, or elsewhere (Return for more). Help[1] On this program, or the World-Wide Web project[2]. Phone book[3] People, phone numbers, accounts and email addresses. See also the analytical Yellow Pages[4], or the same index in French: Pages Jaunes[5]. CC Documentation[6] Index of computer centre documentation, newsletters, news, help files, etc... News[7] A complete list of all public CERN news groups, such as news from the CERN User's Office[8], CERN computer center news[9], student news[10]. See also Private groups[11] and Internet news[12]. From other sites:- 1-23, for more, Quit, or Help:7 List of public CERN news groups PUBLIC NEWS GROUPS AT CERN AIX6000[1] General news about RISC 6000 workstations at CERN APOLLO[2] General news about HP/APOLLO workstations at CERN AS[3] Application Software AT[4] AT News system ATARI[5] New software selection, descriptions CERES[6] CERES/NA45 group news CERN[7] Cern Users' office CMC[8] CERN Micro Club COOPIN[9] COOPIN News system FIND , 1-38, Back, for more, Quit, or Help: If you type quit then the telnet session to WWW gets shut down and you find yourself back in GOPHER. If you choose option 2 from the main GOPHER menu you will be given a selection of Nordic Inforamtion Services. One service that you will all be familiar with by now, is the archie server at nic.funet.fi As you can see by choosing option 5 you open up a telnet session to the "number one ftp site in the Galaxy" I won't go into details about archie. If you want to read more about this service get the back issue of BioBit that deals with the subject. Internet Gopher v0.5 Copyright 1991 Univ. of Minnesota Nordic Information Services 1. NORDUnet NIC Information Service/ 2. BASUN (SUNET info-server) 3. X.500 (Directory service) 4. NORWAY Information Services/ --> 5. ARCHIE at funet.fi 6. Gothenburg University & Chalmers Inst. of Technology (test)/ 7. Info Service at the University of Lund 8. Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm(experimental)/ Warning!!!!!, you are about to leave the Internet Gopher program and connect to another host. If you get stuck press the control key and the ] key, and then type quit Now connecting to nic.funet.fi Use the account name "archie" to log in Trying 128.214.6.100 ... Connected to nic.funet.fi. Escape character is '^]'. SunOS UNIX (nic) login: archie Finnish University and Research Network FUNET archie.funet.fi ARCHIE Type `help' for more information about Archie. This Archie is located in Finland, Europe. Current archie servers (as of Nov 5 1991): archie.mcgill.ca (132.206.2.3) McGill University, Montreal, Canada archie.sura.net (128.167.254.179) SURAnet, College Park, Maryland, USA archie.ans.net (147.225.1.31) ANS, New York, USA archie.unl.edu (129.93.1.14) Lincoln, Nebraska, USA archie.funet.fi (128.214.6.100) FUNET, Helsinki, Finland archie.au (128.184.1.4) Deakin University, Geelong, Australia archie.doc.ic.ac.uk (146.169.3.7) Imperial College, London, UK All of these are available via telnet, E-mail, and client (prospero) interfaces. Avoid using trans-oceanic connections. In case you wish to have search results returned via E-mail, please make REQUESTS via E-mail also, NOT via this interactive telnet session! Send your mail request to: archie@`archiehost' If you have questions, send them to archie-l@nic.funet.fi for our local management to resolve, or archie-l@cs.mcgill.ca for the creators of Archie. archie>bye You could do a "prog xgopher" while in archie to find out sites that have the Xwindows software for gopher... but for now we will just say bye and get back to homebase in Sweden. Back at the main menu if you choose option 8 you can have a look at other gophers and information servers. In this menu, the first on the list (purely by coincidence and by reason of alphabetical order) is the Centre for Scientific Computing the place where I work. We have been using gopher to help users find out what applications programmes we have on our mainframe. Internet Gopher v0.5 Copyright 1991 Univ. of Minnesota Europe --> 1. Centre for Scientific Computing (Finland)/ 2. Norway (information on the academic network)/ 3. Queen Mary & Westfield College (London)/ 4. Sweden (experimental Swedish gopher team)/ 5. University of Graz Austria/ 6. University of Oslo/ By choosing option 1 you can now read about the setup at CSC. We are far from perfect but we do try harder. By choosing option 4 you get a listing of our applications. I think it is good to be able to see how other computer centres manage things... please have a "walk" around our centre and see what we have to offer... perhaps you might learn something from the way we do things. Internet Gopher v0.5 Copyright 1991 Univ. of Minnesota Centre for Scientific Computing (Finland) 1. Tietoa Gopherista/ 2. Etsint{ helpist{ 3. computers/ --> 4. applications/ 5. tools/ 6. graphics/ 7. accounting/ 8. software_list. 9. network/ 10. general/ Our Convex mainframe has only been commissioned about 6 months ago and gopher is a very fine way to give user support. We have different directories for different scientific disiplines and users can get basic help regarding the use of programmes simply by browsing through the files with gopher. Chemistry and Physics are well represented on the mainframe and molbio is just begining to get air under its wings. Internet Gopher v0.5 Copyright 1991 Univ. of Minnesota applications 1. physics/ 2. chemistry/ 3. fluid_mechanics/ 4. mathematics/ 5. others/ 6. statistics/ 7. structural_analysis/ --> 8. molbio/ 9. el/ That is about it. You must be asking yourself is it easy to install and run. Well I wrote about gopher on bionet.software on the 10th of Feb and today on the 12th Don Gilbert had his ftp directories available for reading via gopher. So you can draw the conclusion that either gopher is a neat bit of software or Don Gilbert is a maniac for work. In this case perhaps both are true. WRAPING IT UP This article was prepared with the help of WAIS to retreive information on gopher from the comp.archives.source. Thanks are due to Petri Ojala for giving a demo of WWW and the Swedish gopher, and to Pekka Kytolakso for installing gopher on our mainframe. The Internet Gopher Development Team can be reached via e-mail as gopher@boombox.micro.umn.edu. If you prefer snail mail, they can be reached at: Internet Gopher Team 132 Shepherd Labs 100 Union Street SE Minneapolis, MN 55455 Rob " go for it " Harper