DSHack

Archive Generated December 23rd, 2018
Found an anonymous FTP server with lots of ancient stuff
Author Posted on 2016/08/22
#2122
Megalegacy So I was looking around example.com and there was a link to iana's reserved domains page, and I wanted to see what it looked like a long time ago. So I went on web.archive.org and I was looking at example.com and iana, and on iana's front page, if you go back far enough, they actually have a link to an anonymous FTP server with lots of email logs, papers (I found a paper with details of a 1989 computer worm), and even ancient software (ls from 1993, gzip from 1995) Go ahead and look for yourself:

ftp://ftp.isi.edu

Ancient software:
ftp://ftp.isi.edu/bin.0/

E-mail logs (there are many of them, not only this one)
ftp://ftp.isi.edu/arts/arts.mail

Papers on computer worms:
ftp://ftp.isi.edu/pub/worm-papers/

To use PS.Z files:
Linux/Mac:
uncompress *paper*.PS.Z
ps2pdf *paper*.ps *paper*.pdf

(ps2pdf should come with your distro/OS)

Now open the PDF and you should be able to see the papers.

Windows:
Not sure how to decompress .Z files on Windows (if you know how tell me, I'll add it here)
but once you decompress it you can use this to open them

(btw, on some folders they may say they were edited rather recently (2016) but if you look inside there could still be old files)
Author Posted on 2016/08/22
#2123
MKGirlism Cool!

What's the practical use of this?
Author Posted on 2016/08/22
#2124
Megalegacy
Cool!

What's the practical use of this?


Well, I'm not sure if there's a practical use, I just thought it would be nice to share so other people could find things :) I guess you could learn K&R C (I found a socket client/server system written in C89) and about old viruses, or if you have a museum of old software then you can add the files from the bin.0 folder, but from the stuff I've seen (I haven't looked at all of it) there's not much use.

I wonder why the FTP server isn't public anymore though.