Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!emory!wuarchive!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!uwm.edu!bionet!FINSUN.CSC.FI!harper From: harper@FINSUN.CSC.FI (Robert Harper) Newsgroups: bionet.general Subject: Road maps for the network... where are they??? Message-ID: <9106171040.AA07603@finsun.csc.fi> Date: 17 Jun 91 10:40:56 GMT Sender: daemon@genbank.bio.net Distribution: bionet Lines: 105 Here is an interesting article regarding the state of networking. Are biologists in the same boat... or are we swimming in the open sea? ************************** CLIP ************************ Do you ever get the feeling that all this NREN stuff is going to build us a network that's extraordinarily fast but impossible to use? mitch kapor, in his "building the open road: policies for the national public network" [*], compares the existing mess in the current state of the art at cataloging and describing the services available on the net today as "like a giant library with no card catalog". who is going to provide the moral equivalent of the rand-mcnally road atlas, the texaco road maps, the aaa trip-tiks? what we have now is much more like the old Lincoln Highway, with painted markings on trees and oral tradition that helps you get through the rough spots on the road. efforts by existing commercial internet providers have been mediocre at best. none appear to be much interested in mapping out the network beyond the immediate needs of their customers. if you consider that one of the roles of a commercial internet provider is to provide access to software archives, and then you take a look at the state of the software archives on uunet.uu.net and uu.psi.com, you see enormous duplication, strange and hard to understand organizations of files, no aids in finding materials beyond a cryptic "ls-lR" file, and dozens if not hundreds of files which are stale and out of date compared with the One True Version maintained by the author of the documents. [&] Visiting these places is like reading magazines at a dentist's office, you know that what you're reading was new once a few weeks or months ago. efforts by nsf-funded network information centers have been similarly muddled and half-useful. if you read the Merit proposal to NSFnet closely, you saw plans for GRASP (Grand interface to SPIRES) which was going to be the ideal delivery mechanism for information about the NSFnet to users of the net. Promises promises. What you do have from nis.nsf.net is a stale collection of out of date maps [%], a bunch of traffic measurement aggregate numbers [#], and some newsletters[=]. the work at nnsc.nsf.net isn't all that much better. part of the problem is reliance on volunteered information -- the general approach to network information gathering appears to be not much more than send out a survey, wait, tabulate the responses. very little of this work is what you would call "pro-active", that's why chapter 3 (archives) lists just 26 of the over 1000 anonymous FTP sites and mail-based archive servers available on the net. [?] (Think of it as a road atlas that shows less than 1 road in 40 and you'll get the right idea.) that's not to say that there aren't skilled people out there, it's just that they're generally not supplied with resources adequate to the task they're facing. you aren't seeing organizations like ANS, which seems to be flush with cash and hiring skilled people left and right, hiring anyone with the archivist skills of a (say) Keith Peterson. you aren't seeing innovative applications like "archie", a union list catalog of FTP sites around the globe, funded as part and parcel of NSF infrastructure; it's being done in Canada, with no guarantee to continued existence if it starts to swamp their already soggy USA-Canada slow link or if they need the machine back. [+] you don't see nic.ddn.mil hosting the arpanet "list of lists" anymore, they didn't like the contents so it's gone. [@] the internet library guides are run as best they can by individuals, and they're in the form of long ascii lists of instructions on how to connect rather than an interactive front-end that would make the connections for you -- not that the technology isn't there, just that no one has a mission and the resources to provide them. [!] so what do we end up with? a very fast net (in spots) with a "savage user interface" [*]. multi-megabit file transfers, you can get anything you want in seconds, but no way to find it. regional networks spending large amounts of federal dollars on bandwidth but very little on ways to use it effectively. a vast, largely uncharted network, with isolated pockets of understanding here and there, and no one yet who has appeared with any of the proper incentives and resources to map it out. -- Edward Vielmetti, MSEN Inc. moderator, comp.archives emv@msen.com references for further study: [*] eff.org:/npn/. discussion in comp.org.eff.talk. [@] ftp.nisc.sri.com:/netinfo/interest-groups. see also dartcms1.dartmouth.edu:siglists and vm1.nodak.edu:listarch:new-list.* discussion in bit.listserv.new-list. [!] vaxb.acs.unt.edu:[.library], also nic.cerf.net:/cerfnet/cerfnet_info/internet-catalogs* discussion in comp.misc and bit.listserv.pacs-l. [+] see discussion in comp.archives.admin. archie information can be found in quiche.cs.mcgill.ca:/archie/doc/ [%] in nis.nsf.net:maps. note that several are as old as 1988. no readily apparent newsgroup for discussion. [#] in nis.nsf.net:stats. no readily apparent newsgroup for discussion. [=] in nis.nsf.net:linklttr. no convenient way to search through them short of downloading the whole set. [&] for instance, see uunet.uu.net:/sitelists/ (empty) uunet.uu.net:/citi-macip/ (CITI has withdrawn this code) uu.psi.com:/pub/named.ca (out of date named cache file still shows nic.ddn.mil as root nameserver) discussion in comp.archives.admin [?] nnsc.nsf.net:/resource-guide/chapter.3/. note that many entries have not been updated since 1989. discussion in comp.archives.admin.