More on the initial Prac Task

To succeed in this prac task, you don't have to actually get into ironbark (or whatever), but you do need to have a version of "telnet" on your computer. There are many versions of telnet which are freeware and widely distributed, as well as a few commercial ones.

Start up telnet. On some systems you can do this from within Netscape by doing an "Open Location" (under the "File" menu) and entering a URL of the form (from memory):

telnet://www.latrobe.edu.au:80

If that doesn't work, try typing "telnet" at a DOS prompt, or if you're on a Mac, do a "Find File" for "telnet" and double click it. Once you've got telnet running, select the "Open Connection" menu item and enter: "www.latrobe.edu.au 80" (without the quote marks). This should pop up a "terminal" (command line) window containing nothing at all.

This should be a connection to the WWW server on www.latrobe.edu.au - that is, you should be able to type "GET /Index.html" in the window and get a pile of HTML sent back to you.

The window will probably disappear immediately (it's usually a "Preferences" option to have them stick around after close), but you'll have seen the protocol in action.

The object of this prac exercise, incidentally, is twofold:

  1. To observe the HTTP protocol - stuff like the "GET" operation, and the returned HTML file.
  2. To notice that Port 80 is the "well known" port for the WWW - see the next lecture.

If It Doesn't Work

It's not really an important thing, so don't worry if you can't get it to work.

If it doesn't, it may not be your fault anyway -- one of the more recent technologies that can block access is a firewall, so if you're connected to an Internet Provider outside La Trobe University, this could be what's happening. We'll see later how the protocol works when firewalls are in use.

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Phil Scott