Downloading Connected

Several compressed tar files of the entire encyclopedia are available, appoximately 25 MB uncompressed; 5 MB compressed.

Everything in these files can be accessed through the web site.

With that said, you may wish to download a local copy of the encyclopedia. Please feel free to do so, but also send me some email at baccala@FreeSoft.org so I can keep you informed of updates. Sorry, there's no NT version. NT users can use either Connected.tgz or Connected.zip, but forms won't work.

Connected.tgz

Gzip compressed tar file of "distribution" version of encyclopedia - no server-side includes; can't be updated

Use this version with a UNIX HTTP server

Connected.zip

ZIP file of "MS-DOS" version of encyclopedia - uses C:/Connected instead of an HTTP server

Use this version to put Connected on a Windows laptop - a "road warrior" encyclopedia

Connected.master.tgz

Gzip compressed tar file of "master" version of encyclopedia - uses server-side includes; can be updated

Use this version if you want to play around with the scripts I use for building this thing

Connected occupies 23 MB, and includes 3297 Web pages. Non-commerical use and redistribution are permitted, as is modification, but please give me some credit.

All the files should untar (or unzip) into a single directory called Connected. Move the directory to the top level of your Web site, or your MS-DOS root directory. Many links are designed around a single assumption - that the URL prefix /Connected/ (or /C|/Connected, in the case of the DOS version), will always reach the encyclopedia's directory.

Server-side includes are only used in the master version, but any URL ending in .cgi must be run as a CGI script, all of which are localized in /Connected/cgi-bin/. Perl must be available as /usr/bin/perl, or its location must be changed in all cgi-bin directory scripts that use it. Here's a brief rundown on the CGI scripts:

indexsearch.cgi

Script to search the RFC index (using indextable)

search.cgi

The main search engine - written in perl

dig.cgi

Web interface to /usr/local/bin/dig for /Connected/Topics/06-Sofware/DNS/Dig

showenv.cgi

Boilerplate for building CGI scripts - outputs an HTML form showing all environment variables passed in Not actually used anywhere

showpost.cgi

Like showenv.cgi, but for POST method forms Not actually used anywhere

The bin directory contains various executable files, mainly as a number of command-line utilities I find useful. I usually keep this directory in my search path while working on the encyclopedia. Here is a brief rundown on these files:

addSearch2RFC

add a search form to an RFC's index.html file

checklinks

Verify all the links go somewhere real

htmlcheck
htmlcheck.perl

htmlcheck (multiple files), and htmlcheck.perl (one file), are used to check conformance with standard encyclopedia format, and complain to STDERR of problems. STDOUT are file records suitable for the master index. Used by mkindex.

mkhtmldir

All new pages in the Topical Core and PI Course are created using this script

mkindex

(Re)builds the index file in the /Connected directory, and calls mkoutlines to build the list_of_children files

mkoutlines

Used by mkindex

rfc-index2indextable

Convert an rfc-index.txt into an indextable, suitable for conducting searches on the RFC Indexn I run this script if more RFCs are added, or if a new rfc-index.txt is issued.

sededit

A little script I used to make one sed change on a lot of files. Has a bug - sometimes leaves files zeroed after an error

shtml2html

Convert SHTML files to HTML files

sort_access_list

Sorts a HTTPD access list by date