Re: Mirroring website using email

[Albert Reiner]

[Gary Griswold <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,         Sat, 13 Nov 2004 15:53:48 -0500]:
> A university in a remote location has a 33kbps UUCP connection to the
> Internet.  Because their connection to the internet includes one step that
> is UUCP, they are unable to use HTTP, but use accmail services, such as
> www4mail, agora, emailweb, pagegetter.  For curriculum content purposes they
> would like to obtain a local copy of some specific websites.  Getting pages
> one at a time is very slow, because of their 33kbps connection.  If they had
> a local copy of specific websites they wished to use in course content, they
> would be able to obtain a good response.

Assuming that this is on Linux or something similar, or that they know
how to adapt things to Windows, they might use a local WWW cache.  In
case they use, e.g., wwwoffle
<http://www.gedanken.demon.co.uk/wwwoffle/>, they can basically do the
following:

- Run the wwwoffle daemon with a setting of offline;

- monitor the outgoing/ subdirectory of the wwwoffle spool; the files
  that end up there correspond to different requested files.

  - you can then just read the URL from the files starting with U,

  - retrieve the file by ACCMAIL methods,

  - move it to the http/ or ftp/ subdirectory as appropriate (some
    bookkeeping information may have to be added, including (possibly
    fake) headers),

  - remove the files from the outgoing/ subdirectory.

All of this should be easy to do with some minimal programming /
scripting.

As far as I know there is no need to somehow inform the daemon of the
arrival of new cached information; in fact, I do something similar,
except that the university corresponds to my laptop, and uucp to a
floppy disk carried around.

The downside of this is that the users will first see a message
informing them that "wwwoffle will fetch this page", and they have to
re-load the page after the page has been received.  Presumably,
however, something similar is being done right now, too.

At any rate, if things are done in a different way but web pages
served to users' browsers, you can always put wwwoffled between the
browsers and your old HTTP server, and the latter would only see pages
that are not cached already.

HTH,

Albert.

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