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**** The Hebrew University of Jerusalem ****
**** Computation Center ****
News Bulletin #16
3-February-1991
Today's topics:
- Spelling program.
- Recovery after power failure.
- Hints about finding InterNet names.
- Finding BITnet contacts.
o SPELLER - A public domain speller program is now available. The
program is given as-is without any guarantee to its correctness.
The description of this speller is available in the guide SPELL.TXT;
In order to run it you have to issue the command:
$ PROVIDE SPELL
and then the command:
$ SPELL
will activate it.
We hope to have soon a better speller, which is part of Tex version
3.0 being installed now.
o Power failure recovery - The VAX-9,000 has a battery backup which
allows it to survive power failures of 10-20 minutes. During this
period the system is hung and it restores operation when the power
is applied back. However, when power is restored it takes about 5
more minutes to finish all the self tests. Hence, after a short
power failure please wait at least 5 minutes before disconnecting
and trying to connect again.
o Finding InterNet names - Sometimes you have a name of some system,
but this is only the local part and you have to complete it to a
full domain name. Something similar happens when you have a BITnet
name and you want to find the InterNet name (or domain-name). The
widely used convention (although not always) in the Educational
network is to name the machines as:
Local-name.Institute-name.EDU or:
BITnet-name.Institute-name.EDU
The first step is to find the institute name. use the WHOIS command
to find how the institute name is written when using InterNet
addresses. Then, construct the address and check in the nameserver
whether the address you've constructed indeed exists with the
command:
$ MULTINET NSLOOKUP name
For example, we know the BITnet name CUVMA and we know that it
belongs to Columbia university. First, we look for the domain name
of Columbia with the command WHOIS COLUMBIA. The output we get is:
columbia university (columbia) columbia.edu 128.59.16.1, 128.59.32.1
columbia university (columbia-20) cs.columbia.edu 128.59.16.20
columbia university (columbia-dom) columbia.edu
columbia university (cs-columbia-gw) cs-gw.columbia.edu
128.59.16.16, 128.59.32.16
columbia university (cunixc) cunixe.cc.columbia.edu 128.59.40.143
columbia university (net-cu-cc-net) cu-cc-net 192.12.82.0
columbia university (net-cu-net)cu-net 128.59.0.0
columbia university (net-cucsnet) cucsnet 192.5.43.0
The third line, in which we see inside brackets the word
COLUMBIA-DOM is what we need (DOM for domain name). We see in this
line that the domain name is COLUMBIA.EDU. Now, we guess that the
InterNet name is CUVMA.COLUMBIA.EDU. We try the command.
MULTINET NSLOOKUP CUVMA.COLUMBIA.EDU
and get the result:
name: cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu
address: 128.59.40.129
aliases: cuvma.columbia.edu
Which says that this name indeed exists, although the "real" name of
the machine is CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU while the name we have is a
synonym for it.
o Finding BITnet contacts - A lot of times you have to find an address
of someone in some institute. If this institute has some BITnet
nodes than it might be easier to find it than finding someone who is
only on the InterNet. The first stage is finding some node in the
institute you are looking for. This is done by searching the name
(or part of) in the BITnet nodes list GUIDES$:BITNET.TXT; If you
didn't find it there, then you are out of luck and continue to the
next topic...
Now you have to find the userID of your friend on that node. A
first attempt is to send mail to username INFO or POSTMASTER on the
nodename you found; in this mail please give all the details you
know about the person you are looking for. If you haven't got any
reply or your message has bounced back, then you have to search for
the official contact person for that node. In order to do it issue
the command:
$ SEND/MESSAGE NETSERV@TAUNIVM GET NODENTRY nodename
As a reply you'll get a mail message which is the BITnet's record of
that node. The field :CONTACT lists the official contact person to
whome you should send your query.
__Yehavi:
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