a general comment, a specific problem

ctrbdo%iapa@mailhost.ecn.uoknor.edu (bryan d oakley)
Date: Thu, 28 Oct 93 13:09:41 CDT
From: ctrbdo%iapa@mailhost.ecn.uoknor.edu (bryan d oakley)
Message-id: <9310281809.AA10627@hickory.iapa>
To: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Subject: a general comment, a specific problem

First, the general comment:

My programming group is not connected to the internet (soon, though,
so they tell me); nevertheless, we have adopted X Mosaic as a basis
for our internal documentation on our LAN.  Since we are not on the
internet it's been a real booger (ahem) to 1: get X mosaic, and 2: get
documentation.  Since mosaic was designed to be used to browse the
internet, non-mosaic access to it's documentation is virtually nil.  I
know of one mail server which will send the HTML source for a given
URL, but that is cumbersome (and at our site rather tenuous) at best.

Is there a reason why this documentation cannot be made available for
anonymous FTP, or does such a service already exist and I am just not
aware of it?  I'm referring (obviously?) to all of the help available
via the pull-down menus, installation instructions for httpd, etc.
While the WWW project is fascinating and the tools marvelous, it's
rather cumbersome to install from scratch.  What would really make my
day would be to be able to FTP (via an external machine I have access
to) xmosaic-docs.html.tar.Z, or some such.  

Enough of that; now for the problem: 

We recently got a bunch of indigos, so I got the binary for 1.2 and
for 2.0pre4 installed to try things out.  Works like a charm.  I'm
generally not easily impressed, but this is impressive software.  I
was investigating just what it was all about, and was fascinated to see
that it could pull up a directory of source code from across our LAN
to a Sun box.  No httpd or any other special preparations.  Fresh out
of the box, as it were.  However, when I try to access a file on
another SGI box (on the same LAN) I get the standard 'document could
not be accessed' message.  Same URL, just a different machine name.
This works (or doesn't work...) both with 1.2 and 2.0pre4.

Now, I am assuming that this is some sort of permissions problem but I
don't really know where to look.  I can ftp from my machine to the
remote SGI, so I know the ftp daemon is running on the remote.  I also
assume that X Mosaic uses ftp in lieu of http when httpd is not
running or not specified.  As far as I know, no special security
measures have been installed on any machines since it's a closed
system.  

For specifics, my machine is named hobbes.  The Sun workstation is
hickory, and the other remote indigo is opus.  From hobbes, the following
URL works:

file://hickory/tmp

... but this one doesn't:

file://opus/tmp

Anyone care to comment on where I need to look to solve this problem?
Also, will installing httpd on opus (and hickory, for that matter)
solve the problem?  I'm certain I will eventually, but I want
something that will work across the network in the interim.  It's
taking me a while to get the sources and necessary documentation to do
the installation right. *sigh*

Thanks.  

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Instrument Approach Procedures Automation             DOT/FAA/AMI-230
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Bryan D. Oakley              ctrbdo%iapa@constellation.ecn.uoknor.edu
KENROB and Associates, Inc.              voice: (405) 954-7176 (work)
5909 NW Expwy Suite 209                         (405) 366-6248 (home)
Oklahoma City, Ok.  73132