VesperNet History,
section VesperNet

Archie

Archie Search, now here's something that some have probably heard of before. It's still a work in progress, and hasn't been overly mentioned across the project space just yet.

With The Serial Port finding and reviving Archie, though it would appear that soon after its functionality started to decline - but hey, at least the sources and binaries are available now, which means that the Archie project can be examined and emulated and run on a modern system without all the hackery, which is what I am attempting.

One ...
So far, there is a working FTP crawler / indexer that works just about as close to the original as possible, with a few minor modifications to improve performance significantly - this will run on a modern system to boot. The crawler can and will be further improved.

Two ...
With a working site index, we should also have an Archie server that can use the index. What I have as a reference is old data on searching / search results - and the Archie source. The development here has progressed quite nicely, the WWW form for searching is working nicely, and the Telnet server is also working fairly well.

So what's left for the Archie server project? Having actual Archie client software work against the Archie server. There's a lot here to examine and create something on the backend that runs on a modern system. I can at least say that it is almost working. So far, the implementation of protocol version 1 is working, where version 5 is almost there. Though I don't know if there's any Mac software out there that used the later protocol version. Anarchie used V1 up until Archie support was removed.

Fixing the remaining issues with protocol V5 should hopefully not be too hard, it kind of feels like this should be wrapped up since many of the *NIX clients used this. And it would appear that I've also got the V5 protocol working, there's been a fair amount of back & forth with the protocols and clients, but the ones I have been testing with so far, appear to be working just fine.

With both V1 and V5 protocols working, it's time to move on back to square one, start cleaning up code, tweak, optimize and improve. As far as V1/V5 support goes, they do appear to be working like the real thing, quirks and all.

There are two commands on the telnet side right now that I don't know if I should implement, but could be a nice feature at least for nostalgia purposes, that is the whatis and mail.
I am extremely tempted to implement both, and mail would have to live inside the Vesper DNS either way.

Three ...
So stay tuned, there may be additional updates ~soon. Have a look at the features!

Can you index X FTP site?
As long as it has anonymous access, then sure ... depending on the size of the FTP server, it can take time to index, even if the crawler does support parsing ls-lR files, I have come across enough corrupted ones to warrant staying away from them most of the time.

X FTP site uses username and password, can't you ...
No. I could but won't, that's not how Archie works.

I also know this document is located under VesperNet, however the service initially launches under MacDomain - but is also available behind VesperNet using the old internic domain.

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