from January 1992 note to Annette Nemitz of Sun 1) Do you and your institution have experience in running widely available anonymous ftp servers? If yes, what? We've been running an internationally accessed anonymous ftp site for over 5 years. Many days we have experienced over 100 ftp sessions in a 24 hour period. We use anonymous ftp as a way to distribute documents and software and fixes. 2) What expertise do you have to offer that is unique? We have quite a bit of experience with the WAIS protocol and with publicly accessible systems. Our extended bulletin board (bbs.oit.unc.edu) averaged over 1200 logins per 24 period this week. We have had logins from six of the seven contine nts in the past month. We're still waiting for a connection from Antarctica. ftp.oit.unc.edu is fairly well know as a place to find good documents on the Int ernet already. This week we've had ftp sessions from five continents (a South America connection might have happened and I could have missed it; I was away the first two weeks of the month--hence these brief and breezy replies). 3) What do you consider to be the optimal hardware and software configuration for an ftp server? What is the minimal starting configuration? The real question with an ftp server is storage. ftpd itself doesn't require much in the way of memory or cpu power. Still I'd like to see a RISC based host and one to which memory could be added in case we wanted to add other services (and of course if SUN agreed about these services). About storage, that amount is coonfiguration in good faith, I would have to know more about our proposed database. 4) How would you implement the ftp software and can you provide any special interfaces or help systems for the user? Can you also provide access for BITNET users? anonymous ftp is a fairly standard set up. The interesting problem is finding what you want once you're there. Besides the inclusion of accurate descriptive README or INDEX files at each directory level, we would use the WAIS protocol to make the paths to the programs easily tracable and the contents known. By setting up a WAIS server on the ftp machine and making available both a simple WAIS client and an X-WAIS client, actually finding the documentation or software you desire should be quite simple. Further, much of the documentation could be WAISed making WAIS an attractive way to scan documents and download them as an alternative or adjunct to ftp. We have some experience with mailbased archive distribution of documents; that is in my mind the best way to distribute files to bitnet sites. I would not recommend putting the ftp machine on BITNET.