REVENGE OF THE SON OF
LIMITED ACCESS
(or, "I'd Love To, But I'm Building A Pig From A Kit")
"Hello, kids, it's science project time!"
(Whoops. Sorry -- for a moment there, I was channeling Dr. Forrester from MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000. Never mind...)
Coupla weeks ago, in the first installment of "Limited Access", I was describing how to snarf stuff offa the Matrix with nothing more than a text-based E-mail system. I also described an E-mail server that would retrieve entire Web pages, in-line graphix and all, but you needed E-mail that supported MIME attachments to utilize it. Not to worry, further investigations have uncovered a way to filch those pages with good ol' Charlie Br...er, Juno, or another text-only mail system. Here's what you'll need:
Computer with modem and Windows 3.1/NT/95.
E-mail software. Juno's probably your best bet here; FreeMail, its closest competitor, bit the dust last December. (FLASH! You can download the Juno setup software from http://www.bpserv.com/juno115.zip.)
A text editor that'll handle files larger than 64K, OR a word processor that'll save files in unformatted text mode.
A UUDECODE program (I'll explain what that is in a moment!)
An UNZIPing program. PKUNZIP will do the trick, or if you have a Windows-based unarchiver, even better. Best yet, get WinZip, which also has built-in UUDECODE support.
Now, let's say you're Daring Dirk, celebrity cheesecake connisieur and world-class Stevie Nicks fanatic. You happen to know that the Stevie Nicks Photo Gallery has a new photo of the little Welsh Witch every Monday, but your Net access is slim to non-existant.
No problemo. Fire up Juno and send some E-mail to WWWFetch, like so:
TO: wwwfmail@linux.netmor.com
SUBJECT: queryURL: http://pages.prodigy.com/hiwaymann/pic.htm
Images: Yes
OS: UNIX
Files: 15
Limit: 1.5
Send: No
Here's how it breaks down: The "URL" command tells WWWFetch what page(s) you wanna retrive (up to ten are allowed). "Images" tells it to include all in-line graphics. "OS" lets you choose between long filenames (UNIX) or MS-DOS standard eight-and-three (DOS), for you Win3.1 laggards. "Files" and "Limit" are set at their max levels (15 files and 1.5 megs filespace, respectively). The "Send" option tells WWWFetch whether to return the retrieved URL's as attached .ZIP files (MIME), UUENCODED .ZIPs (UUE), or -- in our case -- not to send it at all (No).
"Okay, Professor Flatline, if we tell WWWFetch not to send me the files, how the screaming blue **** do I get 'em?!?"
Glad you asked. If all goes well, WWWFetch will return a message to you very similar to the following:
FROM WwwFetch Server:
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Query Details:
URLs:
http://pages.prodigy.com/hiwaymann/pic.htm
Your request is done.
Please download the data file from our FTP server:
ftp://linux.netmor.com/wwwfetch/3778480.zip
and unpack it into an empty directory.
If you use pkunzip, you should run it with the `-d' flag in order to preserve the directory structure; GNU unzip does this by default.
FOR YOUR SAFETY:
!!ALL FILES HAVE BEEN CHECKED AGAIST KNOWN VIRUSES!!
Next, point your favorite WWW browser to the file index.html in that directory.
You will find further instructions there.
Please pay attention, that you must download the file from our FTP server within 48 hours - EXPIRED FILES WILL BE AUTOMATICALLY DELETED!
Thank you for trying out WebFetch!
Sincerely,
Netmor Ltd. - Applied Modeling Research
(Obviously, the file name will be different!)
Now we have to retrieve this file. To do this, we'll send more E-mail, this time to the data center at Brooke Shields' old alma mater of Princeton U:
TO: bitftp@pucc.princeton.edu
SUBJECT: <leave blank>open linux.netmor.com
binary
chunksize 55
chdir /wwwfetch
get 3778480.zip
quit
(There are many "FTP Mail" servers, which work just as well as this one, albeit sometimes with slightly different commands. For the complete skinny, refer back to "Limited Access" and "Accessing The Internet By E-Mail -Doctor Bob's Guide to Offline Internet Access.")
If you've done any Internet file snarfing with a command-line FTP client, you'll probably recognize most of these commands. Everyone else, here's the drill: We connect to the linux.netmor.com FTP server, set the transfer mode to "binary", tell it we wanna break the file(s) we're baggin' into 55Kbyte chunks (well within Juno's message-size limits), change to the directory where the file is cooling its heels, retrieve it, then sign off.
What you'll get back will be one or more files that look something like this:
begin 0600 3778480.zip
M4$L#!`H``````*>5-"(````````````````"````,2]02P,$%`````@`IY4T
M(M>=A8(N`0``#0(```<````Q+S$N:'1ME9)=3\(P%(;O^14GW'C7,N=B,*7)
.
.
.
M``````"GE30B@2M7?:<```"G````!0``````````````I(%B1@$`>"YG:690
52P4&``````H`"@`0`@``+$<!````
`
end
This is where the UUENCODE/UUDECODE comes in. Back in the bad old days of the Internet (pre-FTP, never mind the Web and GUI browsers!), hackers needed ways to send programs and other binary files to each other, using nothing but text-based E-mail. (Is this starting to sound familiar?) The UUENCODE program took any binary file and turned it into a special text file using only the basic keyboard characters (A-Z, 0-9, and punctuation) which could then be E-mailed. The recipient of this coded text file could then run it through UUDECODE and reconstitute the binary file. (If you're still having difficulty envisioning the process, think Tang or instant coffee...)
For each UUENCODED message, copy the coded portion of the message ONLY and paste into your text editor. (It should go without saying that, for multi-message file retrieves, the coded parts should be copied and pasted IN ORDER.) Once all the pieces have been assembled, save the resulting file in a convenient directory with the name of the encoded file, a .UUE extension (in the above example, "3778480.UUE"), and no word processing formatting -- text ONLY.
If you have a separate UUDECODE program, run the above file into it to re-create the original .ZIP file, then use your de-archiver to unpack the .ZIP file into a "scratch directory," making sure that you re-create the directory structure of the archived files. (If you have WinZip, merely open the .UUE file; it'll automagically decode it, then allow you to unzip it.)
What you'll get for all this work is a "top-level cover page" called index.html file from Netmor, with relative hyperlinks to the pages/images you just downloaded. Fire up your favorite browser, load index.html, and have fun. Keep in mind that the linked pages and grafix have been renamed for the cover page's convenience, so you may want to re-rename any imbedded pix you wanna save. Also: some graphics-intensive pages use smaller thumbnail images, rather than the full-size pics (or links to same), and it's the thumbnails you end up downloading. Not to worry: note the hyperlinks to the "big pictures" and do ANOTHER WWWFetch session, this time sending the URLs of the pix themselves.
(The joke here is that the real Daring Dirk would never go through such machinations; at one point, lacking file-attachment E-mail, I send him a two-part UUENCODE'd copy of the Rumpus ROM banner. His response: "Since I was constructing a Polaris Missile anyway, I took the steps you outlined and obtained your new banner. GEEZ - COULD IT BE ANY MORE COMPLICATED?" Aaah, you young whippersnappers, afraid of a little manual labor...)
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