I thought this might interest some of you out there trying to navigate
the networks. Netfind is a way to track down somebody's address if
you know there name and roughly where they work. It's helped me track down
a few people in the last couple weeks. It won't find everybody (especially
as some .gov or .com sites refuse connections - I assume for security paranoia
reasons) but it's a good place to start. It does have a side feature of giving
you the names of the machines at a given site as it sorts through the local
network.
Enjoy,
Dan Jacobson
danj at welchgate.welch.jhu.edu
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The netfind Internet white pages tool is now available by anonymous FTP
from ftp.cs.colorado.edu, in pub/cs/distribs/netfind. Netfind may be
freely used and distributed as per the copyright notice in the software.
People who had earlier versions might want to get the current version,
since it has substantial improvements.
The techniques used by netfind are quite different from those used by
the CCITT X.500 directory service. Given the name of a person on the
Internet and a rough description of where the person works, netfind
attempts to locate telephone and electronic mailbox information about
the person, using a number of sources of Internet information. Netfind
can locate millions of people at thousands of sites world wide. Netfind
runs on Suns running SunOS 4.0 or more recent. It is quite easy to
install and use.
A paper about netfind appeared in:
M. F. Schwartz and P. G. Tsirigotis. Experience with a
Semantically Cognizant Internet White Pages Directory Tool.
Journal of Internetworking: Research and Experience, 2(1), pp.
23-50, March 1991.
A pre-publication version of this paper is included in the anonymous FTP
package mentioned above. Papers about the resource discovery project
within which this work was carried out are available from
ftp.cs.colorado.edu, in pub/cs/techreports/schwartz/RD.Papers.
