[gopher] Re: embarrassing newbie question

[John Goerzen <jgoerzen@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Oct 11, 2002 at 01:05:42PM -0400, Stephanie Smith wrote:

> First off, I am running the latest version of UMN's gopherd. gopherd
> serves up files and directories inside its document root no problem. I
> seem to be running into problems, though, when I try to link to outside
> services with the .Links file.

OK, the problem is that you're specifically trying to link to a FTP site
rather than a Gopher site.

In the Old Days, gopher servers would actually act as gateways.  A gopher
client would request the ftp:whatever selector from your own gopher server. 
The gopher server would FTP over to the site, pull over the file, and
transparently hand it off to the client.  Obviously this is inefficient and
not really good for everyone involved, not the least of which is the server
operator.  This is what the ftp: thing in UMN gopherd is doing, but the
gateway to handle that is no longer supported -- and you probably don't have
it installed or configured anyway.

The New Way is with a URL link.  You can read about it at
gopher://gopher.quux.org/0/Archives/Mailing%20Lists/gopher/gopher.2002-02%3f/MBOX-MESSAGE/34

To do this with PyGopherd, you would say:

Name=Cool ftp directory
Type=h
Path=/URL:ftp://updates.redhat.com/
Host=+
Port=+

My recommendation for anyone starting a new server is to go with PyGopherd
instead of UMN Gopherd.  Take it from someone that maintains both :-)

You can also find an extensive, up-to-date manual for Pygopherd at
http://gopher.quux.org:70/devel/gopher/pygopherd
You can also get to that with Gopher.

See the url.HTMLURLHandler section for more details on what you specifically
are trying to do.

PyGopherd supports Gopher, Gopher+, and HTTP protocols and an extended
subset of the extras supported by UMN Gopherd.  PyGopherd does not support
ASK blocks but can serve up Maildirs as gopher directories, for instance.