Wanderings.

Gopher is a internet phenomonon most people know nothing about, and for good reason – it is old and outdated. So why care? Well besides nostalgia, it does still have a use or two, so I decided to write about it.

Originating from the University of Minnesota, whose mascot is the gopher, it predated the web and was much like the web with a few key differences:

1. It was, and is, still all text based and menu based, so it is rigid and inflexible compared to www and http, though it is *seriously fast*
2. It defines each file’s type on the serverside rather than have the client handle it, so it is rigid and inflexible, but very consistent.
3. it is seriously fast.
4. Google doesn’t index it. That’s an important difference, isn’t it?

Wikipedia has an excellent article on gopher as well as on Veronica and Veronica-2 which are the most popular search engines for gopher. If you are really interested in gopher, you should read that article.
So how do you browse gopher? Well, I’m so glad you asked! In a nutshell, Firefox will do it natively. Opera never supported it. IE used to, but it was broken and vulnerable, so they disabled it by default. You can put it back with a registry fix. There are also lots of console/text based browsers as you might expect, and a few popular ones that ran on Windows 95. I’ll stop there.

So if you are using firefox, IE with the registry mod, or some ancient relic, go try Veronica-2. Veronica-2 is a new and improved Veronica that has over 6,000,000 resources indexed, which is a whole heck of a lot for gopher. By the way, also on Floodgap which is who hosts Veronica-2, is a heirarchical list of all known gopher servers in the world, which are presumably the only ones they index.
Did you notice how fast the search engine was? If not, go back and try it – and visit some of the links. (longer phrases take longer to search). We are used to speed with Google of course, but keep in mind, this is *one server* searching many entries.
OK, so on to my point.  Here are some things that might cause you to want to use gopher over a webserver:

1. obscurity – no one will find it unless they really really want to, and maybe not even then.  I’m not suggesting it is inherently more secure.  I’m sure a skilled hacker can take the now open source UMN gopher server and find exploits.  They have in the past.  But it probably won’t get much traffic.
2. speed – it is hella fast for downloading files, which is about all it is well suited for.
3. files – ftp files up to the directory just like you would with a directory listing in apache, but you have the option of putting more description about the files without having to write an index.html for each directory manually
4. No CMS – CMS is nice for some situations.  But it isn’t fast, and generally (tell me if you know better), you can’t upload stuff in bulk and do taxonomy at the same time.

Want to try it out?  There is an old school computer server/community you can find at http://sdf-eu.org.  You can sign up at that website.  They offer gopherspace, web, telnet, ssh, several servers to compile and develop on and much more.  It is a free service, with donations encouraged, hardware is nice (All DEC Alphas it seems), and the people seem pretty cool.  Apparently they have a band too.

As for installing the server software itself, there are more than just the reference UMN gopherd server now.  Pygopherd seems to be the way to go for functionality, and it is in the FreeBSD ports tree.  Running on python, it might take a performance hit, but the Pygopherd site is running pygopherd and it is pretty snappy.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 20th, 2006 at 1:58 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.