harper at convex.csc.FI (Rob Harper) writes:
>1)I am the first to admit that my own gopher is heavily built up
> on the resources that other people have constructed. The feeling is
> that if someone has already done the job then it is easy to just
> establish a link and use it. There is nothing new under the sun.
>> So I would like to ask how people feel about mirroring of resources.
> Is it enough that everyone in Europe pounds Don's GenBank resource.
> Is it enough that everyone in USA pounds Reinhard EMBL resource...
> and everyone in the world jumps on Dan's PIR resource, and when
> these centres run into service glitches then nobody has anywhere to
> go. Do we need duplication??? What should we duplicate??? The BIG
> databases or the smaller ones like ace and aat??? Who is going to
> have the disk space to provide the service???
Rob,
My recollection when first browsing through "gopher space" was
that there was no shortage of places wth GenBank, etc. up for FTP
although Don's site was the only one that I found employing the
elegant gopher entry retrieval technique on GenBank. I didn't make a
list, but it seemed to me that the FTP situation, i.e., for FTPing
over the GenBank taxonomic division files, was closer to overkill than
suffering from lack of sufficient resources. Wish I had some of that
disk space available 8-)!!
After we finish optimizing our present system configuration on
net.bio.net (we were having some problems with the nightly WAIS
reindexing but this should be under control now), we intend to make
the complete BIOSCI/bionet archives available for searching by other
means than WAIS. We are evaluating Gopher and IRX for this additional
capability, and will also set up a dial-in/Internet accessible account
for searching which should assist those who don't currently have any
other means of running WAIS/gopher, etc. Others are, of course,
welcome to duplicate these services if they so desire, but obviously
this is part of our charter here.
Dave
