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collaboration of the School of Information and Library Science and the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at The University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill
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ibiblio Frequently Asked Questions
for Visitors
Note: This FAQ is aimed at our general users on the Internet. If you are an ibiblio contributor and have questions about our internal workings or need to know how to do something, please see our contributor FAQ.
ibiblio is a diverse and expansive collection of information on the Internet, created and maintained by the public, for the public. It is the ultimate collection of freely available information, the future of Internet librarianship, and a collaboration between the former MetaLab.unc.edu (formerly known as SunSITE.unc.edu) and the Center for Public Domain. The Beginning In 1992, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill founded SunSITE, an archive and information sharing environment designed to be contributor-driven and content-managed. After living under the name MetaLab for a period of time, the environment is now known as ibiblio. It has grown to host one of the Internet's most active and respected software archives, coexisting with music archives, large text database projects, and special exhibits. The diverse management and content models of ibiblio complement and inform each other to give users the most useful and relevant information about a variety of topics. Examples include: single content manager archives ranging from folk music to travelogues, academic and librarian-managed archives, historical enthusiast-managed archives such as the Pearl Harbor archives, author-managed archives involving over 100 active authors with special interests such as the Linux Documentation Project. Through these different types of archive models, the resources available on ibiblio range from free applications and operating systems software to graphics and art, from fiction, poetry, literature, and music to religion, politics and cultural studies. ibiblio also offers streaming audio and video. ibiblio currently averages about 1.5 million information requests a day. The Collections As outreach efforts continue, ibiblio collections stress excellence and active contributor involvement above all else. In order to do this, ibiblio must provide for the extension of both the breadth and depth of the collections by offering more advanced tools for the creators of the collections. ibiblio will become the largest collection of freely available and publicly accessible information on the Web. ibiblio stands above other digital libraries by maintaining:
Project Goals
If you've got something culturally cool and need a place to go, check out the ibiblio Collections Criteria to see if your collection would qualify for hosting. If you do think it does, follow the procedures outlined there for contacting us about contributing. If you've got software that you think would go great with our already humongous collection of free software, read our directions on properly uploading software and having it added. What sort of freaks are you guys, anyway? See for yourself. Why did you change names from SunSite to MetaLab? Why did you change the name from MetaLab to ibiblio? From its beginning, SunSITE has been funded by grants from Sun Microsystems. For a variety of reasons, that relationship came to an amicable end. We changed our name because we wanted a vendor-neutral name that expressed what our project has evolved into over the years: a collection of information technology experiments funded by a variety of sources: some academic, some corporate, and some small information technology start-ups. As we continued to grow, we decided it was time to change our name again to more accurately reflect what we have become: ibiblio, the future of Internet librarianship. Who are your major contributors/partners? Our corporate partners are listed on our Partners page. They include: Center for the Public Domain, IBM and Va Linux's SourceForge. Who are your mirrors? A listing of our Linux archive's mirrors can be found at http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/MIRRORS.html. This page is fairly recent and is maintained by our resident linuxguys. How do I mirror something on ibiblio?We prefer that you mirror us using rsync. You might issue something like: $ rsync -av ibiblio.org::Linux/ /pub/mirror/linux You can view all available rsync modules by issuing: $ rsync ibiblio.org:: Note that as our archive has grown, we have had to split some categories of content out among servers in our cluster. If you can't find something via ibiblio.org proper, be sure to try: $ rsync distro.ibiblio.org:: and$ rsync mirrors.ibiblio.org:: to see if the module is available on one of those machines. See the rsync man page for more information in its usage. Note that we disable the 'z' (compression) option on the server side. Most of the data you would be mirroring is probably already compressed in some manner, so the compression option would do nothing but drive up our CPU usage unnecessarily. You can also grab a copy of mirroring software like mirror.pl and point it to ibiblio. Here's an example config:
package=ibiblio_linux site=ftp.ibiblio.org remote_dir=/pub/Linux local_dir=/pub/mirror/linux do_deletes=trueWhat rsync modules do you offer? We offer modules at both ftp.ibiblio.org (ibiblio-hosted content) and mirrors.ibiblio.org (ibiblio-mirrored content). You can view lists of what is available by running rsync ftp.ibiblio.rg:: or rsync mirrors.ibiblio.org::. We offer these simply because people have asked for them. If you want a particular portion of our site offered as an rsync module for your convenience, please mail our support staff. How much space will a mirror occupy? See the current usage. How do I download something from your ftp tree? Connect to ftp.ibiblio.org using your ftp client, login as ftp or anonymous, and use your email address as the password. After that, just navigate your way through our ftp tree by typing cd and ls -al | more until you get to the directory that has the file you want. Use get <filename> to download the file. What do I do with tar.gz files? These files are gzipped and almost always are intended for use on Unix or Linux systems. Try this:$ gunzip filename.gz $ tar xvf filename.tar If you're running a Linux distribution, you need only type $ tar xvfz filename.tar.gz If this doesn't work, you may need to grab a copy of gzip (for Unix systems) from ftp://www.ibiblio.org/pub/gnu/gzip/. If you're running UNIX or Linux, gzip is almost certainly installed. You may also run across files with a .bz or .bz2 extension. These files were compressed with bzip (a more efficient rewrite of gzip) and you can unpack them in much the same way. If you don't have bzip, you can get it here. What other stuff do you have besides Linux? Lots! We've got a redesigned collections page at http://www.ibiblio.org/collection/. That is the main list of all our totally cool content, provided by the many cool content providers that we host. You'll also see at least two different sites featured on our front page every month. We also have tons more stuff in our ftp tree, the General Graphics Interface Project, our GNU Project mirror, and of course, our rock-em-sock-em Linux archive. How do I submit software for inclusion in your Linux archive? Read our directions on properly uploading software and having it added. How do I download and install Linux? All the documentation you'll ever need is at the Linux Documentation Project. They've got HOWTOs for everything, from installing Linux to upgrading your kernel to configuring your X Server to brewing coffee with Linux. A good start for a first install would be the Linux Installation and Getting Started document. How do I find a specific file in your Linux archive? Our search engine skips over most of the files in our Linux archive. Instead, we have another method for finding files: download http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/00-find.Linux.gz. Then, from a shell:$ gunzip -dc 00-find.Linux.gz | grep -i something-cool You should get something like: mymachine:/home/username $ gzip -cd 00-find.Linux.gz | grep -i tcpip /pub/Linux/distributions/slackware/contents/scripts/tcpip1 /pub/Linux/distributions/slackware/contents/scripts/tcpip2 /pub/Linux/distributions/slackware/source/n/tcpip1/mini-inews.tar.gz /pub/Linux/distributions/slackware/source/n/tcpip1/_tcpip1.tar.gz /pub/Linux/distributions/slackware/source/n/tcpip1/SlackBuild ...Who do I contact with questions about the Linux Documentation Project? JDD is your man. Tell him we sent ya. What happened to CEARCH? The Cisco Education ARCHive, aka CEARCH, was a free resource (it's still free, but no longer being maintained) for anyone involved in K-12 education worldwide, be they parents, students, educators or administrators. It was maintained on ibiblio from 1995 to 1999, jointly funded by UNC and Cisco Systems, Inc. Do you do ftpmail? Nope, sorry. What happened to your splash page? Our video maestro, Todd Stabley, used Flash 3 to put that ultra-cool intro together. The musical lick is from Pimp Daddy Nash -- "Jump, Jive, And Wail" from the Private Leftfield Downtempo Fuzz album. After everyone in the office had heard the music for the 199,999th time, we decided to put it away for a while. You may still view and hear the splash page at http://www.ibiblio.org/splash.html. Where can I find the site "Twelve Years a Slave" that I read about in the Washington Post? That article, as well as many other excellent and related documents, can be found in the Documenting the American South Collection. I want to use some of the pictures from the Web Museum. May I? Nicolas Pioch designed the Web Museum in 1994. If you would like to use these images, please read his Web Museum Copyright Page (http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/about/license.html). If you still have questions, you may reach him at pioch@NOSPAM.ibiblio.org if you take out the "NOSPAM." Why does my personal firewall show hacking attempts from one of your servers? FTP connections frequently erroneously trip firewall products or intrusion detection systems. Here is a brief explanation of how FTP works and why it may have triggered your detection system. FTP can operate in one of two modes: normal (or active) and passive. Active mode has long been the default; however, passive mode is being used with increasing frequency. In general, FTP servers can accommodate both modes and will negotiate to what the client has set as a default. Active mode: This mode uses two ports on the server: 20 and 21. Port 21 is designated as the control port (i.e. transmitting get, put, etc. control messages), and port 20 is for transferring the data. At the start of a normal mode FTP session, the client allots two ports with numbers over 1023 for the session. It uses the first to connect to port 21 on the FTP server. During the initial session exchange, the client tells the server the number of the second port it has reserved. The server then initiates a connection from port 20 on the server to that second port on the client. This connection sometimes triggers a personal firewall or intrusion detection system on the client computer if that system does not adapt for outgoing connections. If the intrusion detection system on the client does not realize that an outgoing connection was initiated from within, then it sees the data connection coming from the FTP server as a hacking attempt. Passive mode: Passive mode FTP, on the other hand, allows for both FTP connections (command and data) to come from the client. The client computer connects to port 21 on the server as with active mode. However, when data is requested by the client, the server sends a port number to which the client should connect. The client connects to this port on the server and receives the data. Using this method, passive mode FTP can trigger detection systems because the outgoing data connection from the client is coming from and going to a port numbered over 1023. Additionally, the port numbers on both the client and the server are different for each transfer. As with active mode, if the firewall or detection system does not realize the the client has initiated the connection, it may think that there is rogue software on the computer trying to make an unauthorized connection. Even if you were not using FTP to connect to one of the abovementioned IP addresses/hosts, FTP traffic from our site still may have triggered your firewall or intrusion detection system. If you are using DHCP to configure your IP address, the network traffic which was sent to your computer may have been intended for the last owner of that IP address. Please consult the following article for more information on firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and FTP: http://www.interhack.net/pubs/fwfaq/firewalls-faq.html#SECTION00076000000000000000 How can I contribute a collection to ibiblio? Check out the ibiblio Collections Criteria to make sure you qualify for hosting. If you do, follow the procedures outlined there for contacting us about contributing. |
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