DACS Expands its Internet Services

We are pleased to give notice of our first major expansion into Internet services. We believe these new services will quickly lead to far-better and far-more ways to get the most up-to-date software engineering information to our customers. Perhaps, more importantly, this addition initiates our commitment to keep the DACS synchronous with the dawning Information Age. The explosive increase of interest in Internet, and the immense amount of information that is already available on the Internet, give ample evidence that the Information Age is upon us and, to remain vital, the DACS must take advantage of the potential offered.

Our new Internet offerings is an anonymous FTP (File Transfer Protocol) site. The FTP site allows users with access to the Internet to obtain any or all the DACS Information Packages and selected Software Engineering Reports electronically. Also available are reports published by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University and client versions of these Internet searching tools. The anonymous FTP site can be accessed at the address "ftp.rome.kaman.com." The following commands will login to the FTP site from a machine running UNIX (user commands are in boldface):

>ftp ftp.rome.kaman.com
220 p1.kaman.com FTP server (Version vu-2.1c(1)
Tue Dec 14 10:46:40 EST 1993) ready.
Name: anonymous
331 Guest login ok, send your complete E-mail address as password.
Password: name@___.___
230 Guest login ok, access restrictions apply.
ftp>
A list of FTP command can be generated by typing "help:"
ftp>help

Most, but not all files, now available from the DACS FTP site are distributed in Postscript format. DACS users must have a printer available that can print Postscript language text. The following example shows how to get a file describing the DACS products and services and then logout:

ftp>cd pub/info_packs
ftp>get prod-n-services.ps
200 PORT command successful
150 Opening ASCII mode data connection for prod-n-services.ps (120131
bytes).
226 Transfer complete.
local: prod-n-services.ps remote: prod-n-services.ps
128183 bytes received in 2.2 seconds (57 Kbytes/s)
ftp>quit
221 Goodbye

Other files can be located by using the "ls" and "cd" commands.

In addition to FTP service there are a number of other Internet resource discovery services available for application by the DACS. We are currently investigating the feasibility of a dial-in connection for users without Internet, discussion groups using LISTSERV (a mechanism for broadcasting Internet messages) and WAIS (Wide Area Information Server) which provides more help in searching the Internet than does Gopher. We encourage everyone to try our new Internet services because we need your interest, support and feedback to provide the kinds of services you need. If you have questions about the use of these or other Internet searching tools, or meet with difficulties accessing us, be sure to contact:

Data & Analysis Center for Software
P.O. Box 1400
Rome, NY 13442-1400
(315) 334-4905, Fax: (315) 334-4964
[email protected]

Please watch for the latest announcements available through our FTP site, this newsletter , and other DACS publications. We are committed to making the DACS as accessible as possible, and as the Internet evolves so will our Internet offerings.

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