[gopher] Re: Gopherd or pygopherd?

[John Goerzen <jgoerzen@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, Mar 13, 2004 at 03:42:27PM +0100, Alessandro Selli wrote:
>         I'm just now getting interested in Gopher and I'm currently running
> a gopherd 3.0.3 server.  Since it's running on a slow machine (Sparc5-85),
> would you recommend a C-compiled binary server like gopherd or do you think I
> will not notice a big difference in system load/ memory consumption running
> an interpreted server like pygopherd?  The server is not serving a community
> and the Sparc5 is quite beefed up with ram (232MB).  Are there other
> differences between those two that I should be aware of to choose the correct
> server for my site?

Gopherd is no longer maintained.  Security holes were being found in it
on a regular basis, and nobody really had the inclination to give it a
thorough security audit given the fact that more advanced Gopher servers
existed.  Therefore, I would strongly urge you *NOT* to deploy UMN
Gopherd.

PyGopherd is, to a great extent, completely compatible with UMN Gopherd,
and in many cases, is a drop-in replacement for it.  Being written in
Python, it is immune to a whole class of security bugs that plague not
just Gopherd but other C-based servers as well.

You should have no problems at all running Pygopherd on that machine.
For a project such as a Gopher server, Python will not cause any
noticable performance changes.  You may be interested that some quite
high-capacity servers, such as the Zope web application server, are
written in Python and do not suffer performance problems.

There are several Gopher servers out there.  As the author of PyGopherd,
I may be biased here, but I'd say that PyGopherd is the most featureful
at present, due to its support for most features of both the UMN and
Bucktooth servers.  However, if you want something that is quick to set
up and maintain, without a lot of bells and whistles, you may want to
check into one of the alternatives (or at least disable a bunch of
PyGopherd modules).

PyGopherd also supports Gopher+, HTTP, and WAP as optional features, and
if enabled, will serve your gopher content using those protocols as well
-- all over a single port (70 by default).

-- John