From: Erik Troan Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.announce Subject: Linux related WAIS databases available Followup-To: comp.os.linux Date: 24 May 1993 13:28:51 +0300 Organization: University of Helsinki, Department of Computer Science Lines: 57 Sender: wirzeniu@cs.Helsinki.FI Approved: linux-announce@tc.cornell.edu (Lars Wirzenius) Message-ID: <1tq813INNdu1@hydra.Helsinki.FI> NNTP-Posting-Host: hydra.helsinki.fi Keywords: WAIS, docs, information, sunsite In an effort to stem the never-ending tide of questions such as "Will this run on a 486?", and "Exactly where are the kernel patches to make Linux run my dishwasher every night?", and of course, "Will sunsite ever be organized?", I've created four WAIS databases. They index: 1) The faq 2) The mail-faq 3) The net-faq 4) The LSM (Linux Software Map) For those of you who don't know what WAIS is, look at the bottom of this announcement. It kinda-sorta explains it. The best way to access them is to get the .src descriptions of the databases. They are available at sunsite.unc.edu:/pub/Linux/docs/wais-sources Feed those to your local wais server and you're all set. If you don't know how to do this, telnet to sunsite.unc.edu and login as "wais". It'll ask you for your terminal type and then let you do your very own searches! Let me know if I can make these databases more helpful, or if you think that the information in them is so woefully out of date that while I'm doing a wonderful job of confusing newbies, it would be better if I just ate my foot. Seriously, all comments to ewt@sunsite.unc.edu. Erik Troan ewt@sunsite.unc.edu Pop Quiz: How will this help answer the question "Will sunsite ever be better organized?". Answer: It won't. But I promised to give an answer, so here it is: No. Never. Not until a very warm place that god sends people who are mean to their mothers freezes over. Unless I feel like it of course. ------------------------------------------------------ What is WAIS? This is a *quick* overview. WAIS is a Wide Area Information Service (helpful, huh?). It's a way of making databases available for searching across the network. The WAIS we use (from the freeWAIS suite) does full text indexing. In other words, every word of a document is indexed. You simply give it a list of keywords, and an "or" search is performed. There are ways of specifying more complicated searches, but I don't know them, so don't ask. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Could I bend yer ear fer a tick?" ewtroan@eos.ncsu.edu = Erik Troan ewtroan@vnet.ibm.com - Strictly Ballroom ewt@sunsite.unc.edu