Automated Veronica Menu Bilder (fwd)

[Vladimir Vrabec]

Pratele,
kdo ma zajem, muze si z Nevady prekopirovat kratky perlovsky program,
ktery mu bude udrzovat na gopherskem serveru menu aktivnich serveru
systemu Veronica. Zdravi
                          Vladimir Vrabec

---------- Text of forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 12 Jan 94 15:28:58 -0800
From: Steven Foster <foster at scs.unr.edu>
To: gopher-announce at boombox.micro.umn.edu
Subject: automated veronica menu builder

Hi GopherNauts and Gopher-Administrators:

The use of veronica is estimated to be about 1,000,000 searches per
month now.  There are only a few well-known sites offering veronica
access menus:  Nevada, Minnesota, SUNET, NYSERNET, and a few others.
These access menus are used pretty heavily.

Recently the Nevada network has had alot of downtime, inconveniencing
many people who usually point their gopher servers to veronica.scs.unr.edu
to get the veronica menu.

I think it may be helpful to many gopher sites, to keep their own file of
links to the publicly-accessible veronica servers.  By keeping their own set
of links, gopher sites will not be dependent on the few well-known access
menus, will have a full set of veronica sites available, and will be able to
keep the menu up-to-date as veronica servers come online or drop out.

I have written a program which you may use to create a menu of active
veronica servers within your gopher server menu.  This program can be
run frequently, from your crontab, to ensure that the menu does not
display veronica sites which are down for maintenance or unavailable because
of network problems.  Periodically, the program will "call home" to an
authoritative site, to get an updated list of public veronica servers.

We don't have a real name for this function yet; tentatively  it is
called "maltshop".  Version 0.2 is now available.

The  program is about 300 lines of perl code, and has been tested on several
varieties of Un*x systems.  The code is pretty simple and will probably run
with NO maintenance after you have installed it.  This is however the first
public release, and someone might find a bug....

You can fetch the program by gopher or by ftp.

By gopher:  	Path=0/veronica/maltshop-0.2
		Host=veronica.scs.unr.edu
		Port=70
		Type=0

by ftp:		anonymous ftp to veronica.scs.unr.edu
		/veronica-code/menu-builder-0.2


- Steven Foster
 ( foster at nevada.edu )
---------- End of forwarded message ----------