The NIC is a facility available to all Internet users which
provides information to the community. There are three
means of NIC contact: network, telephone, and mail. The
network accesses are the most prevalent. Interactive access
is frequently used to do queries of NIC service overviews,
look up user and host names, and scan lists of NIC documents.
It is available by using
%telnet sri-nic.arpa
on a BSD system and following the directions provided by a
user friendly prompter. From poking around in the databases
provided one might decide that a document named NETINFO:NUG.DOC
(The Users Guide to the ARPAnet) would be worth having. It could
be retrieved via an anonymous FTP. An anonymous FTP would proceed
something like the following. (The dialogue may vary slightly
depending on the implementation of FTP you are using).
%ftp sri-nic.arpa
Connected to sri-nic.arpa.
220 SRI_NIC.ARPA FTP Server Process 5Z(47)-6 at Wed
17-Jun-87 12:00 PDT
Name (sri-nic.arpa:myname): anonymous
331 ANONYMOUS user ok, send real ident as password.
Password: myname
230 User ANONYMOUS logged in at Wed 17-Jun-87 12:01 PDT,
job 15.
ftp> get netinfo:nug.doc
200 Port 18.144 at host 128.174.5.50 accepted.
150 ASCII retrieve of <NETINFO>NUG.DOC.11 started.
226 Transfer Completed 157675 (8) bytes transferred
local: netinfo:nug.doc remote:netinfo:nug.doc
157675 bytes in 4.5e+02 seconds (0.34 Kbytes/s)
ftp> quit
221 QUIT command received. Goodbye.
(Another good initial document to fetch is
NETINFO:WHAT-THE-NIC-DOES.TXT)!
Questions of the NIC or problems with services can be asked
of or reported to using electronic mail. The following
addresses can be used:
NIC@SRI-NIC.ARPA General user assistance, document requests
REGISTRAR@SRI-NIC.ARPA User registration and WHOIS updates
HOSTMASTER@SRI-NIC.ARPA Hostname and domain changes and updates
ACTION@SRI-NIC.ARPA SRI-NIC computer operations
SUGGESTIONS@SRI-NIC.ARPA Comments on NIC publications and services
-4-
For people without network access, or if the number of documents
is large, many of the NIC documents are available in printed
form for a small charge. One frequently ordered document for
starting sites is a compendium of major RFCs. Telephone access is
used primarily for questions or problems with network access.
(See appendix B for mail/telephone contact numbers).