UNET

Using CMS: Communicating with People, Using the Internet
Contents
Using your Mainframe Account for Electronic Mail
Finding People, Sharing Files, the TELL Command
Personal World-Wide Web Pages
Using the WWW Browser
WINNEWS and FTP

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Using your Mainframe Account for Electronic Mail
When you have a CMS account, you automatically have an electronic mail address: 
      userid@maine.edu
where "userid" is your mainframe id. The mainframe is no longer used for e-mail. Some people with older mainframe accounts may still use the CMS MAIL command, however we urge those users to switch to the new mail server: mail.maine.edu. For assistance in doing this, please contact the UNET help desk.

To learn how to use the current mail system, please view the documentation at http://www.maine.edu/unet/user_serv/email.html.

To use the (obsolete) mainframe mail system, logon to CMS and in Shell, select "Working with Mail." For more information, use the CMS HELP online documentation from the "Working with Mail" menu, or refer to the documents listed below:

Please see:

  1. The Quick Guide to Mainframe Electronic Mail.

  2. Troubleshooting CMS Mail (or "what to do if I get a disk full message from mainframe mail?")

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Finding People, Sharing Files, the TELL Command
There are two CMS commands that help you contact other mainframe users or others in the University System: WHO and PHONE. To use these command from the Shell menus, in the Main Folder, select "Information Services:"
information services
If you look down this list of services, you will see the phone book item and the "who" item.

WHO is used with a last name or a person's mainframe userid to determine the person's name and e-mail address. Unfortunately this only works with holders of UNET CMS, POP and Saturn accounts. Here is an example where the WHO command was typed in (the Shell menu was not used): 

     WHO KENNEDY,Q
(case does not matter). This will return information on any UNET accounts whose holders have last name "Kennedy" and first initial "Q." Alternatively, who can be used with an id: 
     WHO QKENNE51
to find out who is the holder of that id.

The PHONE command is only used with people's names. This accesses the combined faculty and staff phone books for all the UMS campuses and center. An example: 

     PHONE KENNEDY,Q
This shows you a page in the combined phone books that is as close a match as possible to the search name. You can then browse through the phone list using your F7 and F8 keys and quit using F3.

Files can be quickly copied from one CMS user to another by means of the SENDFILE and RECEIVE commands, or a user can set up filesharing so another user can access his/her files and directories. For information on setting up sharing, please see the online help: 

     HELP SFS

The SENDFILE command will send a copy of a file to someone's "reader." The "reader" is really a public disk space on CMS where files that are "in transit" can be stored temporarily. The reader is used for incoming electronic mail, files waiting to be printed, jobs submitted to batch systems, and files sent using SENDFILE. The person to whom the file is addressed will be notified that it is waiting for him/her, and can then move the file from the "reader" holding area to his/her personal mainframe disk space using the RECEIVE command.

In the Shell menu system, these commands are available through the "Working with Files" menu. See the item "RdrList of files in your rdr queue." See also the online help for SENDFILE and RECEIVE.

The TELL command can be used to "chat" with another CMS user who is logged on at the same time as you are. It is also used to send commands to certain CMS software - notably to the e-mail system. The format is: 

     TELL id message
where "id" is the user or system you want to chat with, and "message" is what you want to say. If you send a message to someone using the Shell menus, he or she may not even notice you have tried to communicate (the receiver of the message gets a little box saying they have a message, but many people don't notice the box!). If you receive a message and you are in Shell, use "Working with Messages" in the Main Folder to view your incoming messages. Use this same menu to send messages.

If you are not using Shell, you are "beeped" when a message comes in and your screen displays the message. Press your CLEAR or PA2 key to return to your normal screen after reading the message.

One important use of the TELL command is to control e-mail forwarding. If you want all e-mail addressed to you on the mainframe to be sent to some other e-mail address instead, you can use TELL to set the forwarding address: 

     TELL MAILER SET FORWARD address
where "address" is the e-mail address where the mail is to be sent. To turn off mail forwarding use the command: 
     TELL MAILER SET FORWARD OFF
For more information on this use of TELL, do: 
     TELL MAILER HELP

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Personal World-Wide Web Pages
Your CMS account can be used to house a personal World-Wide Web home page. In order to create a home page on CMS you must:
  1. Create the home page files.
  2. Create a special directory on the mainframe for these files.
  3. Put the files in the special directory.
  4. Make that directory and all the files in it readable by the public.
As described in the section of this document on working with files you can use the CREATE DIR command to create the directory, and file transfer or XEDIT to create the files on the mainframe. If necessary, use RELOCATE to move files from the top level of your mainframe disk space into your special directory.

For information on the special directory name you must use and how to make your directory public, see the home page procedures WWW pages.

When you use an HTML editor or Web editor to create WWW pages on a PC or Mac, you must keep in mind that once these files are transferred to CMS, you will need the file names to conform with CMS rules. Thus you should probably keep the names of your files to eight characters or less, and use only letters and numbers. For example, it is easy to use long filenames including blanks and other special characters on a Macintosh. Avoid doing this for files that will be transferred to the mainframe.

When you are constructing Web files, they will have names in two parts: a name and an extension which will be things like ".html," ".htm," ".gif," ".jpg," etc. Once these files are transferred to CMS the periods vanish and the ".html" etc. extensions become the second part of the mainframe file name. Thus "index.htm" becomes "INDEX HTM" on CMS. This is the correct way of naming these files.

Once you have created your directory, moved your files into it and set the public access, you can view the result using URL: 

     http://maine.edu/~yourid/
where "yourid" is your mainframe id. This will automatically select a file called INDEX HTML or INDEX HTM in your special Web directory as the start page. Note the tilde (~) character that precedes your id in this URL.

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Using the WWW Browser
CMS has a text-only World-Wide Web browser installed. You can use this to navigate throughout the Internet WWW services, just as you can use Netscape Navigator or MS Internet Explorer. The difference, of course, is that the CMS browser does not display any graphics. This feature may be useful for someone using MS-DOS or using a screen reader program that reads the computer screen aloud.

The CMS command to invoke this browser is 

     WWW
or 
     WWW url
where "url" is the place you want to go in the Web. The WWW screen indicates at the bottom which F keys to what. To select a link, move your cursor to the highlighted link by pressing TAB, and then jump to the linked URL by pressing ENTER or Return.

You can also invoke WWW from Shell. In the Shell Main Folder, select "Information Services" and in there select "Browse the World-Wide Web."

However you enter WWW, you can exit using F12 and get help using F1.

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WINNEWS and FTP
USENET news is a bulletin board system as old as the Internet (in fact older - it started with ARPANET). It is composed of thousands of discussion topics or "newsgroups" whose names indicate the subject matter. The newsgroups can be listed, selected from the list, and opened to view the list of current postings. Each posting can then be opened and read, and responded to in various ways.

CMS displays news in three forms: local Maine and New England newsgroups, Clarinet news and the full set of groups. All of these can be accessed through Shell's "Information Services" menu (use "Personal HOTLIST News" to access the entire list of groups).

To learn more about news, please use one of the above Shell choices or enter the CMS command: 

     WINNEWS
and use F1 to read the online documentation.

The mainframe runs an FTP server and has an FTP client available via the "ftp" CMS command. So to transfer files between your mainframe disk space and some other computer you can either logon to the mainframe and use the "ftp" command to send and receive files, or you can use the other computer's ftp tool to access your space on the mainframe.

If you want to use the mainframe's ftp command, the other computer must be running an ftp server program that will responde to the mainframe when it sends ftp requests. The UNET consultants may be able to assist you in setting up an ftp server on your desktop machine.

Alternatively, if you don't want to or cannot run an ftp server on your computer, you can instead run an ftp client program such as WSFTP (Windows) or Fetch or Anarchie (Macintosh) and use that to connect to the mainframe's server to copy files back and forth.

The mainframe ftp command conforms to the usual ftp rules. See any documentation on ftp, or consult the following reference: "What is: FTP".

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University of Maine System Network for Education and Technology Services, Copyright © 1999, revision date 2/25/99.