"Aaron J. Grier" <agrier@poofygoof.com> writes:

> On Mon, Jun 25, 2001 at 09:40:27PM +0200, Jan H. van Gils wrote:
> 
> > At the moment I don't have a connection with the Internet for my
> > NetBSD system. So is there an other way to sup ?
> 
> sup over UUCP?  ;)

Back in the 80's and early nineties there were ftp-via-email servers
around - you could send email to a 'bot at a particular address
telling it what file(s) on what server you wanted, and it would grab
the file, uuencode it, and split it into a bunch of emails of whatever
size you told it, then send you back all the emails. Worked wonders
when all I had was email (and also made it incredibly simple to clog
up the 9600bps bitnet connection to where I was located :-) Eventually
they would give up, and load up the backend of (the local equivalent
of) a station wagon with reels of tape, and send them on an overnight
drive to the other end of the line.) Sometimes I would get files 2
weeks after I requested them; sometimes not at all. Of course, then I
figured out that our bitnet connection used the scheduling algorithm
of "send the shortest job first", and started requesting my files with
shorter and shorter segment lengths, and it degenerated into total
uselesness ;-)

It's more likely that this person has Internet connectivity to
someplace *close* to his laptop, though. Maybe what he needs is the
-current equivalent of the floppy-size filesets. Or perhaps the laptop
has a CD drive on the laptop, and the latest snapshot could be burned
onto a CD?