Experience with a FreeNet prototype Walter Lewis walter.lewis@sheridanc.on.ca HALINET (The Halton Information Network) The origins of this project lie in a history of 15 years of co-operation between an expanding network of partners in Halton Region including - public libraries - school boards - Sheridan College Recently, this partnership has continued to evolve as relationships have been established with the regional and area municipalities and a number of other organizations. These organization have a broad ranging agenda, both for internal automation and public inquiry. Consequently, HALINET's focus has been on a telecom infrastructure and secondarily, on an Information delivery mechanism. Halton Freenet The local Freenet is seen by the HALINET group as a service offered to the community, facilitated but not run by the HALINET partners. The Halton Freenet has its own Steering Committee and will be evolving its own agenda. The Prototype Over the course of winter/spring 1993 a prototype of a FreeNet was developed by the HALINET partners. The process is illustrative of how we have operated to this point. Some lessons might be drawn from this experience. In late fall 1992 the HALINET steering committee concluded that a prototype would be set up using the FreePort software. Sheridan made available an old unix box (a DEC microVAX), which they agreed to pull out, dust off, rack up and plug into the Sheridan network. The Board of Education found the funds necessary to acquire the Case Western version of the FreePort software. By mid-January the software was more-or-less in place. Several weeks passed by Sheridan staff, in the midst of their other duties, hacked enough of the source code that it would run on the version of ULTRIX (DEC's version of unix). The lessons immediately learned were 1) get a "supported" box or 2) have committed staff who know unix well. So far as skill sets were concerned, Sheridan College provided the expertise to get the program to compile and execute, has to date administered accounts, provided a system operator and a telcom expert. Currently this is a relatively small part of two people's lives. Sheridan and other partners in HALINET set up a FreeNet Products Task Group (of which I was co-chair) to identify appropriate information, design menus and implement them. The implementation required the expertise roughly embraced by a graduate of the "Unix for Dummies" school of systems administration. To date (August 1993) our emphasis has been entirely on the information side. There are no user services, beyond the default compilation, all user accounts are passworded. On the other hand, there are links to Hytelnet, the University of Minnesota gopher, and over 3000 Usenet newsgroups. These wide open links are useful for research purposes, but will have to be restricted in some fashion before a public Freenet can be launched. Another major initiative is to link the Freenet machine with the four public libraries in the region. At this point the link to the Halton Hills Public Library is live, but exiting still requires more knowledge than we have a right to expect of the casual user. Negotiations on this point are ongoing with the library system vendor (Dynix). The connection uses a Wellfleet AFN (selected because of its broad internetworking capabilities and upgradability), a Motorola Codex 24000 bps modem and TCP/IP on the library machine. The service proved very easy to link. Menus are simply unix text files with a two character code at the beginning to indicate to the menu reading program what to do with the following text: whether to display it or not, and to whom; to execute a named program; to display a text file on the screen; and the like. This files can be linked on the fly and in no way require recompiling. So what are we currently working on? 1) user services: including guest logins 2) a private modem pool: to by-pass Sheridan College's passworded pool. 3) private newsgroups: for local discussions 4) negotiations with CLARINET for expanding Sheridan's licence for this collection of UPS/Standard Broadcasting newswire information. We hope to build local indexes to this with gopher. 5) private gopher(s): to be better integrated with the structure of information in the larger freenet 6) a more "hypertext" like approach to menus, which includes a larger number of cross-links between useful areas of the system. 7) helping the rest of the libraries, and other local information providers to get "online" with their information databases. 8) licensing the information in a number of commercial data sources. While these are often distributed on CD-ROM Sheridan has a pilot for moving the data onto larger hard-drives, thus making the information vastly more networkable. We look forward to an era where the data is independent of the search software, in ways that allows a variety of client software to take advantage of the system. And of course, bringing a firmly established Halton Freenet to the local community (and the Internet) in a reasonably expeditious manner.