Title: Gopher !
Author: paco
Date: 2018-08-04
Type: article

_** Update 2019-12-22: Changed links to gophernicus source code, as yargo@sdf
points out, the original author passed the flag some time ago.  Thank you
Yargo._

It came to my attention that [gopher][1] is still active. And I could not
anticipate how active !

I like it's simplicity, and the lack of ads/tracking/otherevils so I
though that I would put the content of this site (for what is worth)
available on port 70 too.

Here's how, so I don't forget immediately.

This is tested on OpenBSD 6.3 all the way to 6.9.

First, install a gopher server. In this case [gophernicus][2]

    $ doas pkg_add gophernicus

I used inetd(8) to expose gophernicus to the world, adding this line to
/etc/inetd.conf:

    gopher stream tcp nowait _gophernicus /usr/local/libexec/in.gophernicus in.gophernicus -h "e1e0.net" -nv

`-h` is hostname, and should be a valid one (the hostname of the
machine). `-nv` is disable virtual hosting, which I don't use. There's
more options in it's help or github, but with `-h` you're good to go.

By default gophernicus will server content on `/var/gopher`. So once
inetd is (re)started, you can take your gopher client of choice and take
a look. You should see something like

    Welcome to Gophernicus!
     _______               __                      __
     |     __|.-----.-----.|  |--.-----.----.-----.|__|.----.--.--.-----.
     |    |  ||  _  |  _  ||     |  -__|   _|     ||  ||  __|  |  |__ --|
     |_______||_____|   __||__|__|_____|__| |__|__||__||____|_____|_____|
                    |__|

    If you can see this, it means that the installation of Gophernicus
    on this system was successful. You may now add content to this
    directory and replace this page.

    ...


That's the default "gophermap". You can start adding content to the
default folder at this time, but modifying the gophermap to look better
and link to some content is better.

For some instructions on how this gopher protocol works, take a look at
this [readme][3] from gophernicus.

Mine is the same content served on http. I decided not so long ago to
just write everything in plain text and create index.html/gophermaps as
needed. So simplicity to the max.

    o--o-- Articles
    
    0Barcodes, Partkeepr and parts providers(TME)	partkeepr_barcodes_and_TME.txt	e1e0.net	70
    0Password management in the terminal done right.	pass_terminal.txt	e1e0.net	70

As the readme pointed earlier explains, first line is just text (you can
write or put fancy ASCII banners or whatever). Then the links have this
syntax:

    Xname<TAB>selector<TAB>host<TAB>port

Where `selector` is the path to the resource and `X` is one of:

    Valid filetypes include:
       0   text file
       1   directory
       3   error message
       5   archive file (zip, tar etc)
       7   search query
       8   telnet session
       9   binary file
       g   GIF image
       h   HTML file
       i   info text
       I   generic image file (other than GIF)
       d   document file (ps, pdf, doc etc)
       s   sound file
       ;   video file
       c   calendar file
       M   MIME file (mbox, emails etc)

There are a couple more special chars for that first line character.
Take a look at docs.

So now the terminal lovers can find this site at gopher://e1e0.net/

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)
[2]: https://github.com/gophernicus/gophernicus
[3]: https://github.com/gophernicus/gophernicus/blob/master/README.Gophermap