Appendix 9:

Mirrors of The Nine Planets

Copies of "The Nine Planets" are maintained at several different locations on the Internet. Please use the one most "local" to you. See below if you would like to make a new copy at your site.

North America

SEDS; Tuscon, Arizona: This is the primary home of TNP, maintained by the author. This site is updated much more frequently than the others. Chris Lewicki of SEDS made this possible by giving me a full shell account on his machine. Thanks to his generosity, the original copy of TNP at Netcom is history.
Texas Tech University Department of Physics; Lubbock, Texas: This site is maintained by Alan Sill; see also their home page.
Brown University; Providence, Rhode Island: This site is maintained by Anurag Shankar.
University of Washington; Seattle, Washington: This site is maintained by Alan Cairns.
York University; Toronto, Ontario, Canada: This site is maintained by Ilan Graifer.
UC Santa Barbara; Santa Barbara, California: This site is maintained by Matt Schalit.
Northwestern University; Evanston, Illinois: This site is maintained by Pred S. Bundalo.

Europe

Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum; Hamburg, Germany: This site is maintained by Heino Peters. This should be the preferred choice for most Old World readers.
Bessenyei György Tanárképzô Fôiskola; Nyíregyháza, Hungary: This site is maintained by Sandor Biro.
University of Wales, Aberystwyth; UK: This site is maintained by Ben Ketteridge.
University of Exeter; UK: This site is maintained by Brad Bagilhole.
Paris Observatory; Meudon, France: This site is for access from France only. It is maintained by Laurent Demailly.
Faculty for Electrical and Computer Engeneering, University of Ljubljana; Ljubljana, Slovenia: This site is maintained by Iztok Umek.
University of Theesaloniki; Theesaloniki, Greece: This site is maintained by Andreas Athanasopoulos.
MC-link; Rome, Italy: This site is maintained by Stefano Iacus.
József Attila University; Szeged, Hungary: This site is maintained by Károly Dévényi.

Australia

Australian National University; Canberra, ACT: Readers in the Western Pacific and East Asia should try this one (or the one below) first. This site is maintained by Craig Savage.
University of Wollongong; Wollongong, NSW: This site is maintained by David Brooks.
State Library of Tasmania; Hobart, Tasmania: This site is maintained by Jim Palfreyman.

Asia

Togane Girl's High School; Chiba, Japan

This site is maintained by Kunio Takahashi.

Oita University; Oita, Japan

This site is maintained by Nakano Makoto.

International Systems Research; Tokyo, Japan

This site is maintained by Carlos A. Varela.

Kashima Space Research Center; Kashima, Japan

This site is maintained by Yasuhiro Koyama.

Chinese University of Hong Kong; Shatin, Hong Kong

This site is maintained by Angus Siu.

Institute of Mathematical Sciences; Madras, India

This site is for access from India only. It is maintained by Radhika Vathsan.

Selecting one of the above links will take you to the Table of Contents page at the corresponding site; all subsequent pages will be read from that site, too.

Establishing a new copy

If you would like to make your own copy of "The Nine Planets" I am happy for you to do so provided that you do not modify it or remove my name from the bottom of each page. A local copy will work fine on a machine without an Internet connection so long as you don't try to follow external links. Here's all you have to do:

Make a directory; you'll need about 6 megabytes;
cd into that directory and ftp a copy of //ftpseds.org/html/billa/tnp.tar.gz;
Extract the archive with gunzip and tar; most of the files will end up in the directory "nineplanets";
Make sure the ownership and permissions are OK for public read-only access;
Customize "host.htm" as described below (optional);
Point your WWW browser at "<path>/nineplanets/nineplan.htm" and make sure that everything is OK;
Send some mail to me (billa@znet.com) with the URL of your new copy so I can update the mirror list; also let me know if you would like to receive email notifications of future updates.
Announce it to the world.

Customizing your site

Each page of "The Nine Planets" has an anchor at the bottom which links to "host.htm". You can customize that page for your own site:

Make a copy of your logo 32 pixels high and no more than 40 wide (it will work if you make it bigger, but it may look ugly).
Replace "icons/host.gif" by your version (change to old one to seds.gif if you want to keep it).
Modify host.htm as you wish. You'll probably want to
- add some text to describe your site;
- add a link to point to your site's "home page";
- add your own name at the bottom.
Keep a separate copy of your versions of host.htm and host.gif (they will be overwritten next time you get an update).

This is optional -- if you do nothing then the SEDS icon will be used and host.htm will refer to the primary site at SEDS.

Updates

I update TNP very frequently. The latest versions are always at the SEDS site. When a sufficient number of changes accumulate (but usually not more than once a month) I create a new tnp.tar.gz file and mail notifications to the maintainers of the mirror sites.

If you want the most up to date files you can always ftp to //ftpseds.org/html/billa/tnp/ and copy individual files that are newer than your versions.

But there is a better way. Several of the mirror sites are using the "mirror" package to keep their copies of TNP up to date automatically instead of waiting for me to send these notices. I urge you all to do the same.

Here is Laurent's mail on the subject:

>I use the perl's mirror package, which is available :
>        src.doc.ic.ac.uk [146.169.2.1]
>                directory: computing/archiving/mirror
>(the version i use is 2.3 (with some changes), dunno if its the
>latest, 2.3 is also 
> on ftp://hplyot.obspm.fr/net/mirror-2.3.tar.gz)
>
>my setup for mirroring all your stuff (ie nineplanets, twn,...) is
>file packages/seds.lpl.arizona.edu :
>-----8<-----
>package=nineplanets
>        local_dir=/space/poubelle/dl/np
>        site=seds.lpl.arizona.edu
>        # compress nothing
>        compress_patt=
>        remote_dir=/html/nineplanets
>        exclude_patt=(^|/)(host|.+tar\.gz|\.mirror$|\.in\..*\.$|MIRROR.LOG|#.*#|\.FSP|\.cache|\.zipped|lost+found/|\ )
>        delete_excl=(^|/)(host|\.mirror$|\.notar$|\.message$)
>-----8<-----
>Its important to put host in the exclude and delete exclude pattern to
>avoid the local version to be overrode or deleted.
>
>mirror package setup is not trivial, but experienced sys admin should
>have no problem with it, with some experiencing,

Laurent's setup will also mirror "The Web Nebulae" and the other stuff in my directory at SEDS in addition to TNP. You are welcome to do that, too, though it doesn't really matter to me (there's only a small amount of traffic to TWN so it's not a problem for me). If you don't want to mirror the other stuff, just add the appropriate strings to the exclude_patt.

And Ilan writes:

>I am using the mirror perl package from src.doc.ic.ac.uk, and it works 
>very good. I haven't encountered any problems with it, and as far as I 
>know, it is the standard package used by all the major ftp sites to 
>maintain mirrors upto date.
>
>The installation of the mirror software doesn't require root access, 
>however a copy of perl 4.036 should be installed on the system. I am 
>almost sure that perl can be installed by a regular user, so mirror can 
>be used even on systems that don't have perl installed in the system 
>directories.
>
>The documentation that comes with mirror is very short and doesn't really 
>explain how to configure the software, so this might be the biggest 
>problem in installing it. The man pages contain all the relevant 
>information, but are quite technical and hard to understand.

There are two reasons why you should consider going to all the trouble to use the mirror package: it means your mirror stays up to date automatically without any further intervention on your part, and it's a lot faster -- you have only to download the changed files instead of the 5 megabyte tar file (which is mostly gifs).

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