Description

This article is from the soc.culture.australian FAQ, by Stephen Wales with numerous contributions by others.

2.1.4 Finding people

* Currently about 30 academic institutions in Australia offer Gopher
servers. If you have access to gopher you can use these servers to
examine local email directories. Unfortunately this facility appears
to be restricted to educational institutions, there's nothing
available in the .com.au hierarchy. [2/93, CP]

* For organizations, it's best to use nslookup (read the manual pages
first). Example session:

% nslookup
> server aarnet.edu.au
> ls edu.au
[...]

There's also the information posted in comp.mail.maps occasionally --
most of it is dated, but some of it might be helpful.

* For people, mail to mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu with "send
usenet-addresses/[name]" in the body of the message. If [name]
has posted to Usenet in the last few months, the mail server will
send back a list of matches. Otherwise, try:
telnet bruno.cs.colorado.edu, login as netfind.
telnet NIC.DDN.MIL, login as whois.

(telnet://bruno.cs.colorado.edu telnet://NIC.DDN.MIL)

(Not very useful -- user has to explicitly register with the server.)

* Another resource which is slowly being developed is the X.500
directory system. Gateways into this system can be found on many
gopher servers both within and outside Australia (e.g. there is one
accessible from the gopher at Monash university). The system
currently contains address information for about 80 commercial,
academic and scientific organisations.

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