Welcome to the community of Alpine users!

The publicly-available Alpine servers are called "Luther.alpine", and "Ebbetts.alpine". (Luther runs on a Dorado named Bataan, and Ebbetts runs on Franklin. Terminals for both machines are in carrell L-1 outside room 2132.)

Packages using Alpine are Walnut, Whiteboards, Finger, and Yodel. The .load files for the user commands for each of these packages will run AlpineUserImpls.bcd.

In order for you to store files on an Alpine server your RName must be registered as an owner with the server and you must be given a quota on that server. These administrative functions can be handled by members of AlpineWheels^.pa for Luther and Ebbetts. Unlike the IFS, creating a file must not put the owner over quota. If you run out of space, send mail to AlpineWheels^.pa.

Alpine provides access control on files. Each file contains a "read access list" (default "world") and a "modify access list (default "owner"). These lists may contain RNames, plus the special values "world" and "owner". The lists must fit into a fixed amount of space associated with the file, so it is a good idea to grant access to groups rather than individuals (say, grant modify access to [CSL^.pa, ISL^.pa] rather than to [Atkinson.pa, Birrell.pa, ... ]).

An Alpine server does not provide text names for files. However, a package included in AlpineUserImpls.bcd and run on the workstation provides a simple directory system. A file is named by a character string of the form "[server]<owner>file!version", for instance "[Luther.alpine]<YourName.pa>Walnut.segment!1".

An Alpine server does not have a Telnet "executive" interface (you can't talk to it via Chat). It does support the FTP protocol (so you can talk to it using FS commands from the CommandTool, and using BringOver or SModel). In addition, a Maintain-like program called Yodel lets you copy files to and from Alpine servers, list directories, control access to files, and, for Alpine administrators, control the owner data base. See [Cedar]<Cedar®>Documentation>YodelDoc.Tioga.

Alpine clients such as Walnut should Import from [Cedar]<Cedar®>Top>AlpineUser.df in their df files to get the necessary Alpine files (AlpineUserImpls.bcd should be sufficient).

One symptom of an Alpine crash is a total lack of response in a client application. You may not see an uncaught signal. The reason is that RPC does not time out long calls. Other symptoms are messages like "communication with server has broken down" or extremely frequent transaction aborts. For now, the only way to be sure is to go logon to the server. If you suspect that the server is acting strangely, please tell one of the implementors (Hagmann or Hauser or W-S Orr) right away.

Our warranty:

We make every reasonable effort to make the Alpine servers available at all times, and to preserve the files that you store on Alpine servers. However, from time to time, we may find it necessary to recover files from the previous evening's backup rather than recover them with bit-tweezers, and we reserve the right to do so until further notice.