# # Introduction to nic.funet.fi archive # # Status: Update in progress # Author: staff of ftp.funet.fi # Created: Sat Aug 22 20:31:58 1992 # Last modified: 2023-01-27 # Welcome to FTP.FUNET.FI aka NIC.FUNET.FI aka BIO.NIC.FUNET.FI It runs on two Linux servers with dual 20 core processors, 786GB of memory and 2 x 25Gbit/s network connections. 80+ TiB storage is provided from NetApp NFS NAS servers. This system is owned by the finnish ministry of education and operated on their behalf by CSC primarily for the Finnish Academic and Research Network FUNET users and the Elixir Community. It is located in the town of Espoo in Finland. Paper mail address: NIC.FUNET.FI coordinator Harri Salminen CSC POBOX 405 (street address is Keilaranta 14) FIN-02101 Espoo FINLAND https://www.nic.funet.fi/contact This server group has many names. Its "staff" will always be at `nic.funet.fi', but othervice consider using philosophy: `name by function', thus FTP from ftp.funet.fi. ftp.funet.fi traditional anonymous ftp service (also with http and IPv6 support) www.nic.funet.fi http access to our collections (shows index.html's if any) nic.funet.fi email and other administrative tasks (in practice ftp is also supported) rsync.nic.funet.fi rsync protocol for bulk downloads bio.nic.funet.fi bioinformatics data and software kernel.nic.funet.fi Linux kernel which originated from here We have also several other names and may move some services to other computers as we see necessary. CONTENTS: - Intro - What is considered proper conduct of anonymous FTP usage - Contacts about material in here ( GIFs and others ) - Uploading - CD-ROMs - FTPD sources - Reporting a bug/problems - Physical disk structure is hidden behind logical one - Restrictions - Minimum of maximum retrieval rate - IP-reversal and valid "passwd" requirements - What is `Freely distributable' ? - Other services available from here - Many names of the server INTRO: This system has plenty of freely distributable material on its FTPable areas. We have also other services, see at the end of this document for pointers. Privacy issues are now described in a separate README.PRIVACY document in the same directory you found this. E.g. https://www.nic.funet.fi/README.PRIVACY If you have any questions regarding MATERIALS in this archive, read first `Contacts about material in here' below. If you can't locate correct person/mail alias with it, try Funet Network Operations Center noc(at)funet.fi WHAT IS CONSIDERED A PROPER CONDUCT OF ANONYMOUS FTP USAGE: Like many systems world wide, ours offers anonymous logins for FTP users. Such a service means: - You do not need to apply an account at this server, just use well known userid: anonymous (or ftp) and for a password please do enter your email address (in format: your_userid@your_site) according to the convention used since the 1970s in public FTP servers. - While this service is called "anonymous" due to that well-known userid, it is considered good manners to identify yourself properly. (No, this is not truly anonymous.) (See README.PRIVACY) For those who have this privilege of using ftp, here are some do's and don'ts: - When you are transferring large amounts over long distance links, do limit yourself to off hours. When working between the USA and Finland, try it after 4 PM OUR time ( 10 AM Eastern USA time.) And remember that we wake up 10 hours before California. We are at time zone `UTC +2h' and in summer 'UTC +3h' - Major portion material in this archive originates from various locations all over the world. We try to indicate origins if we know them. Do try to use server nearest (network wise) to yourself. - When you log in anonymous, system immediately identifies you, and if you are not limited by number of users, you are prompted with: 331 Any password will work Alternatively, read the man-page of ftp-program (assuming you are using UNIX ftp client), and see what is said about ".netrc" or other ways of setting presets. - See below more about what is `Freely Distributable'. After all, it is not always the same as Public Domain! - Don't do many parallel downloads, it will slow down the service for others and eventually even you. There's a maximum limit on simultaneous connections for FTP which is shown when you log in. In some occasions for example we had to limit the maximum connections from one IP address to 10 or even block them. - REMEMBER: USING ANONYMOUS FTP IS A PRIVILEGE. DON'T ABUSE IT! CONTACTS ABOUT MATERIAL IN HERE: Most of the active content is originated from some other site, please contact them, not us for questions or contributions. E.g. if pwd says that in the path is a directory /pub/mirrors/ then it's clearly not originating from us. Name of the mirror origin can usually be deduced from the directory name under /pub/mirrors/. Look also in the documentation or source code, if applicable, for README, CONTACT or something like it. Or even try searching the web for the creator of the software or data in question. If you can't figure out the origin of the content, then use the generic contact information at the beginning of this file. UPLOADING: If you want to upload or contribute some files for publication, please contact the NIC.FUNET.FI coordinator for more information. Be prepared to proof your identity, the origin of the content and permissions required for distributing the content. If an area is no longer actively maintained, we don't normally accept new contributions unless there's a good reason and clear documentation. Those areas are mainly preserved for their possible historical value. If you still can't figure out what to do you can contact the NIC.FUNET.FI coordinator with all relevant informations concerning your case. CD-ROMs Every now and then we are asked for a CD-ROM of this archive; so far there are none available with the exception of the Euroscene 1 collection based on part of the Amiga area. We don't expect many exceptions... Reasons for this are multiple, not the least of them being our unwillingess to do the effort of publishing such a set. Arranging the publishing on this kind of directly government funded system is not so easy in legal wise when it comes to direct money making as of selling those CD-ROMs... Also it doesn't too well fit to our main business idea of providing all the WAN network services the Academic and Research community needs. The whole archive on CD-ROM would take thousands of CD-ROMs and require lots of manpower to figure out what should or shouldn't be on each cd-rom and how to finance it. We are a network service provider, not a cd-rom store. Some software collections are available commercially, with technical support, on CD-ROM from other sources (e.g. most Linux distributions). That may even be a major revenue source for maintaining those collections so they might not even allow cd-rom versions by others. Some other collections however are specifically available as CD-ROM images (.iso) that you can burn yourself and even distribute according to their copyright statements. So please read the fine print before redistributing collections available from us. FTPD SOURCES: For a simple to maintain ftp server, you might want to look at www.pureftpd.org, we have used it successfully in several different places. Another Very Secure choice might be vsftpd available from http://vsftpd.beasts.org that is being used by many large sites. REPORTING A BUG: If you observe odd behaviour of this server, which is not of what you believe to be correct, please contact problems@ftp.funet.fi and in the report have attached a session log which shows the wrong functionality. However, check at first what we state about "Restrictions" below! Such log should start from your FTP session startup, and it should contain: - Descriptions about your (computing-) environment relevant with attempted FTP access; - Maker and model of the computer where you ran your FTP session, - TCP/IP software model and maker (quite many system do not come with builtin TCP/IP -- VMS-machines are one such example.) - UNEDITED (verbose, unabridged) session transcript showing EVERYTHING you sent to this system, and what were the responses. Note: Reports about corrupted files belong to archive area keepers; they handle those files; "problems" handles the server subsystem. Bugs/problems relating to ARCHIVED MATERIAL: Select by list under: `Contacts about material in here' Bugs/problems relating to other parts of system software: Problems group: ("system software" does not mean anything under /pub/") If you can get /README without trouble, don't contact , but one of earlier mentioned area administration aliases. WHAT IS `FREELY DISTRIBUTABLE' ? Freely distributable does not mean the same thing as PD (public domain). A big portion of the software available here is not in the public domain, although it is freely distributable. Many are copyrighted by some person or organization, but can be distributed freely; there may be limitations on the manner of distribution and/or the usage of the programs. There may also be certain rules concerning the distribution of modified versions (derivate work) of the programs, like saying that if you redistribute a modified version you must include in the distribution the date and author of the modification. Also on many programs you must include a note crediting the original author of the program if you use his code in your own programs. An example of this is the Free Software Foundation's GNU software. GNU software may be distributed freely, provided that the sources are included, an offer to distribute the sources is included or that a pointer to where the sources can be gotten from is included. On FTP.FUNET.FI, all the GNU source code published is available from the directory pub/gnu. Some GNU binaries are available from other directories as well; although we have tried to include a pointer to the sources and the copyright information in these other directories, too, it might be that we have neglected some. This note is here to point you to the sources in pub/gnu. For further information, the GNU copyright is in the file pub/gnu/COPYING. Take also in account the provisions of the european GDPR directives and document appropriately. If the material contains information that could be used to identify persons please make sure that the information is freely distributable. Also if you have many such entries, you may need to declare it as a registry of persons and make sure that the persons in question don't object in being such a registry (e.g. list of contacts, authors or references in documents or mailing list archives etc. also may constitute a registry and not just a formal database. We have multiple filesystems that are all mounted via mountpoints under the /.m/ directory. We may move mirrors and other directories from one filesystem to another without notice, so please refer to our directories with the official /pub/ or /index/ path instead of the physical /.m they map to and might be shown to you by various user agents. Especially all /.m/mirror*/ filesystems are all symlinked via the /pub/mirrors/ directory and the subdirectories try to match those on the original site. A very concise history of NIC ============================= 1988 First of December Finland gets it's first internet link of 56Kbit/s via the NORDUnet co-operation and major part of the traffic was from FTP 1989 Funet saw the need for a FTP-server that would allow better access to the internet content (web was still a dream) from Finland. Decision to set up NIC.FUNET.FI was made and Request for Proposals sent out 1990 First NIC.FUNET.FI, a SUN 4/330, with dual 40Mhz SPARC processors, 128MB RAM and 6GB of usable disk space which made it then among the largest FTP servers in the Internet. Our international internet connectivity for whole Funet was 64Kbit/s so mea develops an ftpd with speed limits More hardware details are available in /pub/files/Historical/staff-docs/historical/First-NIC-Hardware.txt 1991 Linus Torvalds offered a small OS for public distribution which our volunteer Ari Lemmke decided to call Linux and the name stuck... International connection was upgraded to 128Kbit/s 1992 We had about 20GB of external disks and a motherboard upgrade making it in practice a SUN 630-41 MP International connectivity was upgraded to 1Mbit/s 1994 Second NIC with 275Mhz Alpha processor, 320MB of memory and 100GB+ disk space (DEC AXP3000-900) International connection for Funet upgraded to 2 x 2Mbit/s 1999 Third NIC with four processors and 4GB of memory (a SUN 450) was taken in use. Under 1TB made from well over hunred old and new disks in two RAID racks (DEC and Eurologic) International connections used 155Mbit/s links with redundancy 2003 A user survey to determine whether users still need NIC is made with an encouraging response 2006 The fourth version of NIC from Fujitsu-Siemens Computers with 16GB of memory and four processors is taken into production initially with 3TB+ EMC CX300 SAN storage array. A SUN V240 is in a support role. 2.5Gbit/s and 10Gbit/s international links 2007 5-6 TB SAN storage added. Dark fibers with support for many lightpaths deployed in the Funet backbone. 2010 Fifth version of NIC, a Dell R710, with dual Quad-Core Nehalem EP (2,53Ghz Intel Xeon 5540) processors, 72GB of RAM and storage from the CSC storage area network (initially 10TB+ from a EMC CX700) taken into use under Solaris 10 and the ZFS filesystem. Network connection is now 10Gbit/s to the Funet backbone and multiples of 10Gbit/s to the rest of the Internet. 2012 bio.nic.funet.fi R710 servers and NetApp storage added to the NIC.FUNET.FI to primarily serve Elixir bioinformatics community 2019 Sixth version of (bio)NIC, two Dell R640 servers with 2 x 20 core processors and 786GB of memory each. 80+TB of NetApp NFS storage running under Linux. More historical pieces of information can be found in various files around NIC and especially a more generic Internet-history in a concise web format at http://www.nic.funet.fi/index/FUNET/history/internet/ There's also a more verbose article of NIC now and then at the CSCnews 3/06 available at https://web.archive.org/web/20070107152338/http://www.csc.fi/csc/julkaisut/CSCnews/Edelliset_numerot/CSCnews3_2006