ARCHIE LS LISTING FORMATS

If you run an archive site and want to help archie out in maintaining
your site in the database, please read the following.

Some archive sites have adopted the practice of having a cron
job generate an "ls-lR.Z" file in the root directory (automatically) on a
frequent basis (depending on how often the files at your site change). We
would like to see this practice adopted by all archive sites: it lessens
the the network load by having the file compressed so less traffic has to
flow and it lessens the load on the site host since the adminstrators can
determine when it is most convenient for the program to run. If it is
possible for you to set up such a system, there are three conditions that
would make easier for us:

(1) Before the ls is done, a cd is done into the ~ftp directory so that
the pathnames generated don't have something like "/usr/pub/ftp"
prepended to them. As you can imagine everybody puts there ~ftp somewhere
else and we have to deal with each one of these individually. Don't worry
if your ls generates "./" in front of the directory name, we can handle
it.

Please DO NOT cd into the ~ftp/pub, or whatever directory you have most
of your archived files in. The reason is that we depend on the listing
being in the ~ftp directory so that the pathnames that archie generates
are correct. We have had many cases of ls-lR.Z files being generated from
~ftp/pub and so files that should have the name /pub/foobar come out
looking like /foobar. It doesn't bother us to have directories like /bin
and /etc listed... it takes up about 12 bytes in the database for each
extra one and since the database is almost 70Mb we say "hah" ! :-)


(2) Make sure that all symbolic links are resolved. We have found that
this is the main cause for error messages being interspersed through the
listing. We often get "foobar not found" messages in the listings.

Since these error messages are written to stderr while the listing is
written to stdout, they tend to appear randomly in the listing making it
difficult for our software to parse it.

(3) Make sure that no "Permission denied" messages are generated by ls.
If you don't want anonymous ftp to be able to go into that directory just
make it unreadable, and so only "unreadable" messages are generated which
are written to stdout and can be handled in the general run of things.


Once you've done this, you can drop me a line at 

	archie-admin@cs.mcgill.ca

and tell me. I periodically make passes through the database to find out
who does and does not have the file but it is time consuming (getting the
files and checking out that everything is ok) so that if you can tell me
that it's ok, I'll take your word for it.