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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!allegra!mit-eddie!godot!harvard!seismo!brl-tgr!wmartin
From: wmartin@brl-tgr.ARPA (Will Martin )
Newsgroups: net.news.sa
Subject: NIC Registration Tools?
Message-ID: <5498@brl-tgr.ARPA>
Date: Mon, 29-Oct-84 12:00:53 EST
Article-I.D.: brl-tgr.5498
Posted: Mon Oct 29 12:00:53 1984
Date-Received: Wed, 31-Oct-84 01:14:25 EST
Distribution: net
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab
Lines: 36

Greetings!

I'm the host administrator for a non-USENET UNIX machine on the MILNET
called ALMSA-1. As "host administrator", I handle the administrative
side of running the machine, like being the contact point for the users
(I'm not responsible for the technical or operating systems side of things).
Anyway, being a MILNET host, all our users are registered with the ARPANET
Network Information Center (NIC). As people leave, are added, or change
data, we have to provide the NIC with update information. 

What I was hoping to find is one or more other UNIX machines out there
who are also on the ARPANET or MILNET, and who have developed some
form of automated tool package to facilitate these update actions. The
NIC will happily provide us with an extract of their database, listing
their records of all our users; however, this has always been in a nice
human-readable format, with each "record" occupying a dozen lines or
so of a straight text file, and with each line labelled. Their update
process is set up to take this same format as input, so we make changes
to this info and send it back to them in a message. However, doing this
with an editor gets rather tedious, and the UNIX editors we are used to
are not set up to write out a defined chunk of the file being edited and
append it on the output file (as we would need to gradually build a
file of update transactions to mail off to the NIC). 

This human-readable format isn't suited to most UNIX automated tools
(I have written the NIC asking them if they can provide extracts in
other formats), so I am wondering if anyone out there has already
devised tools to process this NIC-supplied data.

Any advice or experience would be welcomed.

Regards,

Will Martin

USENET: seismo!brl-bmd!wmartin     or   ARPA/MILNET: wmartin@almsa-1.ARPA