Access Options for Friends and Partners Server

We have received many questions about the "how to's" involved with 
accessing the Friends and Partners information. There are several 
different methods of access -- and one new method we are exploring (#5 
option below).

We thought we would summarize today these different methods. 


1) the best; have a unix workstation, Macintosh, Windows PC (486, 
ideally), or Amiga computer hooked up to the Internet with its own 
Internet Protocol address and running the latest version of the free NCSA 
Mosaic software. This is wonderful but often not an option. . .

2) second best, is a SLIP or PPP connection to a unix server which 
assigns you an IP address and thus gives you an Internet connection 
(although a slow one -- delivered over a modem connection at 9600 or 
14,400 baud). This is definitely possible and is increasingly being 
offered at universities and by commercial internet server providers. As in 
#1 above, this option requires the use of the free NCSA Mosaic software.

(NOTE: There are some other excellent WWW browser software packages such 
as Cello for the PC. Mosaic appears, though, to be the most popular 
browser available today.)

3) If you have Lynx installed on your local host computer, you can use 
the 'G'o command with the following URL: 

http://solar.rtd.utk.edu/friends/home.html 

to connect.

If you don't have Lynx but you can use telnet from your computer, just 
telnet to solar.rtd.utk.edu and enter 'friends' (without the quotes) at 
the login prompt. This will place you on our computer where you will be 
running our copy of the Lynx software. Note: you must be emulating a VT100 
terminal to use this.

This is not a bad way at all to access the server (the Lynx software is 
amazingly good stuff) but it does not allow you to view graphics and 
listen to audio in the same way as Mosaic. 

4) If you cannot use any of the above options but you do have email 
access to the Internet, you can interact with our email <--> WWW gateway 
to obtain material from the Friends and Partners server. 

5) Finally, many folk do not yet have any sort of network access. We are 
looking at an option that will allow these people to access the F&P 
information locally (from their own machine) if they are using a a 
relatively high end PC or Macintosh, an Amiga, or a unix workstation.

This involves installing on a local computer a complete copy of the F&P 
server -- complete with Mosaic, as well as graphics viewing software, 
audio software, etc. The end result is a 'local' version of F&P which has 
everything that is on our primary Internet-based server= .
This is all 'do-able' because of the 'local' mode option of Mosaic. 
Because it does not have to travel the network to grab information, it is 
actually faster than the Internet version. But that is the only advantage 
. . .

Disadvantages: (1) you would have to update your material periodically 
from our server to keep your local version up-to-date; (2) if you 'click' 
on a resource which is not located on our server, the access will 
obviously fail (you simply get an error message). 

Although we cannot do much about the #2 disadvantage, we are planning on 
providing a periodic update service for those folks who wish to use this 
method. We feel this may be of particular interest to folks in the FSU who 
just do not have any sort of network access in their immediate future.

If you are interested in experimenting with us on this #5 option, we will 
gladly make the server material available to you via ftp or, for a few 
cases, we could mail some diskettes to you. When compressed, all of the 
text, graphics, and audio files are about 5 megabytes. Uncompressed, this 
will use about 7M on your disk (including all of the software). As the 
server continues to grow, disk space may become a problem. We can easily 
imagine the day when we will have 20 or 30M of material. 

Dr. Jim Falen of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville Department of 
Germanic and Slavic languages is our first 'tester' of this new method. We 
are looking for additional folks who might be willing to be 'beta testers' 
for us.


Please send your comments / questions / suggestions to: 

natasha@ibpm.serpukhov.su OR gcole@solar.rtd.utk.edu