if you have access to the AFS network (AFS basically is a file system that allows you to "cd" into directories on machines at other universities as if they were located right on your local machine), please help to lighten the load on our FTP machine by making a symbolic link to our archive in our home directory.
To do this, in your AFS home directory, simply type in....
"ln -s /afs/umich.edu/group/itd/archive archive"
what this will do is create a path, or to your machine, a pseudo-directory to which you can "cd" to and end up in our archives without having to ftp.
If you're a system administrator on the AFS network and have some spare CPU to spare, please consider setting up anonymous ftp for the archives.
It's possible to access our mac.bin directory, for information, read the 00introduction file in the mac.ftp directory.
AFS is a remote file system somewhat like NFS, but much more secure & stable. To the user, it looks like the machine has a very very large local hard drive mounted onto "/afs"; but in reality, when one "cd's" into /afs/umich.edu, s/he is actually going into the University of Michigan "cell".
If you'd like more information on the AFS network and technology and its advantages, you can send e-mail to "afs-sales@transarc.com" or phone them up at 1-412-338-4400. The software is commercially available but check to see if your institution/company/university already has a site license for AFS. Tell them 'archive.umich.edu' sent you!
mike@archive.umich.edu
[Note: Although there are apparently no plans to make AFS client software available on the Mac, PC, or other smaller machines, "translator" software may be run on a Unix machine to make the AFS file system available to these machines on a local area network. For example, this is being done at the University of Michigan on Appletalk and Novell networks. AFS is available for a wide range of Unix machines, and a few others. Contact Transarc for details.
click here to return to the archive index.