HOW TO SEARCH THE WEB by fravia+

(Based on some original private emailings from +ORC)

You'll never download on line again

Letter 005 - July 1996


We saw in the precedent letter how to utilize an AGORA server to make some searches through LYKOS and other search robots on the web and how to get emailed to us -automatically- any resulting "http://...page" from the Web.
Let's resume what we have learned:

TO SEARCH (Agora_search: Lykos)

To: agora@dna.affrc.go.jp ("agora" server)
Subject: (nothing here)
Body: send http://lycos11.lycos.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/flpursuit?first=1\\&maxhits=30\\&minterms=1\\&minscore=0.01\\&terse=standard\\&query=winice95+Softice

TO SEARCH (Agora_search: Webcrawler)

To: agora@dna.affrc.go.jp ("agora" server)
Subject: (nothing here)
Body: send http://webcrawler.com/cgi-bin/WebQuery?W_ICE+S_ICE

TO SEARCH (Agora_search: CUIWWW)

To: agora@dna.affrc.go.jp ("agora" server)
Subject: (nothing here)
Body: send http://cuiwww.unige.ch/cgi-bin/w3catalog?cracker%20tutorial

TO GET A PAGE (Agora_retrieval):

To: agora@dna.affrc.go.jp ("agora" server)
Subject: (nothing here)
Body: send http://info.webcrawler.com/mak/projects/robots/robots.html (a document about robots on the web)
(You may use the command "deep" instead of the command "send" if you want all the linked pages on the site too... WATCH IT: You may get hundreds of pages!)


An Agora server it's a great thing, but has a limit of 5000 "lines", which makes it useless for downloading files that may at times be as big as a couple of million of bytes (for instance Netscape Navigator).
For bigger files you'll have to use an ARCHIE search, a FTPMAIL retrieval, a UUENCODE/UUDECODE decoder and a PKZIP/PKUNZIP unzipper.
Sounds complicated, but it's pretty easy, and very useful, so you better learn it as soon as you have some time to spare. Grasping these techniques will be very useful, do believe me.

TO SEARCH FOR GOODIES (Archie_search):

To:__________archie@archie.funet.fi_________(this is the good suomi archie, but there are many more)
Subject:______(nothing here)
Body:________set search sub______________(substrings included)
____________set maxhits 200______________(100-1000)
____________set maxhitspm 6______________(not one file all over)
____________find snap32.exe______________(we want to find out where is this utility)

(Get a list of all Archies emailing an Archie with only "help" in the body)

Well.. yes, you SHOULD ALREADY KNOW THE EXACT NAME of the program you are searching through Archie... try the same search with find snap instead of find snap32.exe and you'll see what I mean. Remember that on the Web Nomen est omen as +ORC wrote. Besides, there are Archies and Archies... the servers in the EAST (i.e. Russia and Poland, Korea, Cina and Yugoslavja) are the best ones for our purposes. The servers in the States and in the European Union are almost useless for this kind of search: too much censorship and no real freedom in these oligarchies of money and forced publicity, where frills and bad taste count much more than knowledge and studies, this desert of intelligence, populated by TV_zombies and consum_slaves, witlessly called "free" world...(but do not despair! There are other tricks for us to apply, here :-)

If you follow the instructions above, you'll get an answer, after a while, for instance something like this:
Host space.mit.edu    (18.75.0.10)
Last updated 20:02 22 Jan 1996

    Location: /pub/mydir
      FILE    -rw-r--r--  407040 bytes  19:55 28 Nov 1995  snap32.exe

now that you know where the file is, you must ftpmail it, in order to get it, therefore you better get yourself aquainted with ftpmail.
This will enable you to get any software on any subject!
For details of how to use ftpmail send a message with the word "help" in the body (nothing in the subject) to:
bitftp@wm.gmd.de
ftpmail@ftp.uni-stuttgart.de
ftpmail@grasp.insa.lyon.fr
ftpmail@ieunet.ie
ftpmail@plearn.edu.pl
ftpmail@doc.ic.ac.uk

LET's GET A FILE (FTPmail_retrieval):

To:___________bitftp@vm.gmd.de______________(a good german ftpmailer)
Subject:_______(nothing here)
Body:_________open space.mit.edu_____________(open the target server)
______________cd /pub/mydir_________________(go where you should)
______________bin_________________________(prepare for a FILE, not text, transfer)
______________get snap32.exe_______________(I want this goody... in order to crack it with +ORC's lesson 9.1 ;-)

THAT's IT! You'll get your file ftpped to you per email, without having to move a finger!
Using these email searches and retrieval systems helps
- Because you'll concentrate on the SUBSTANCE, and ignore all the stupid "mediatic" frills (you'll despise all the "Netscape enhanced pages, after a very short while).
- Because you can "shoot" all your queries in the morning (it takes only few minutes on line because you prepared them off line) and "gather" all the results in the afternoon (again, few minutes on line), and you'll have the whole evening to study them at ease, off line, preparing accurately the next query steps for the next day.
- Because you'll slowly grasp the emerging of very interesting "patterns": Some servers (in Bulgaria, Rumenia, Russia, Jugoslavja, China) have a lot of "goodies" that you'll never find on the european and north american servers. Some archies are more useful than others. This "ping-pong" approach is indeed slow, but much more "finalized" than the butterfly browsing which brings nowhere.
- Because you'll keep a good "Breadcrumbs trace" of your findings, always ready as reference for the next journeys.
All this does NOT mean that you should never browse and only email the Web, obviously, it's only ONE WEAPON more in your arsenal of knowledge, and you should use it as such.
Let's imagine (just academically speaking, because you should always BUY your software), that you would like to look for some cracked copies of softice/winice on the Web.
These copies change location continuously, for obvious reasons, and you should do searches with the right names, because on the Web, as +ORC said, "nomen est omen". Here are some of the names you would eventually have to use:
DOS SOFTICE: S-ICE280.ZIP; sice280.zip
WIN 3.1 WINICE: SIW152.ZIP
WIN'95 WINICE: RSH-SI95.ZIP; si322p95.exe; siw323-95.zip; siw9532.zip; siw32395.zip
NT SOFTICE: nt323.zip; siw323nt.zip; siwnt32.zip;

Please submit any other name you know of

(And now the part for the newbyes)

All large files you get ftpmailed will be "divided" in many sendings, and you'll have to save all of them in a subdirectory before DECODING and UNZIPPING them. What follows should be pretty obvious, but since this letters should explain COMPLETELY each subject, I'll nevertheless explain the basic concepts of DECODING and UNZIPPING

TO DECODE:

Things are not yet finished: the file will come per email... therefore it will be most probably uuencoded, a standard encryption used for transferring non ascii codes through ASCII charachters... only thing you should know: you'll need a program: WINCODE, to decode it.
Fetch it from somewhere, it's shareware: put it in a subdirectory of your harddisk.
Wincode will allow you to UUencode files you want to send per email and to UUdecode the encoded files you'll get.
How does it work? Read the instructions.

TO UNZIP:

This "wincode" file is zipped, i.e. compressed. That's a common trick for sending large files.
You'll need an utility: PKUNZIP, to decompress it (and almost all other files you'll get from the web).
Put pkunzip.exe in your c:\ harddisk ROOT (not in a subdirectory).
Put the previous Wincode.zip in a special directory you'll create in your harddisk, say "wincode".
Now just execute the dos command pkunzip -d c:\wincode\wincode.zip ... it's all, this will decompress it.

CONCLUSION:

Now you have everything you need to FIND and DOWNLOAD ANY FILE on the planet. Go ahead, enjoy!

Go ahead, enjoy!

fravia+, July 1966


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fravia 12 Aug 1996