Common Questions and Answers about the Internet Gopher, a

client/server protocol for making a world wide information service,

with many implementations. Posted to comp.infosystems.gopher,

comp.answers, and news.answers every two weeks.

The most recent version of this FAQ can be gotten through gopher, or

via anonymous ftp:

pit-manager.mit.edu:/pub/usenet/news.answers/gopher-faq
Those without FTP access should send e-mail to mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu

with "send usenet/news.answers/finding-sources" in the body to find out

how to do FTP by e-mail.

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List of questions in the Gopher FAQ:

Q0: What is Gopher?

Q1: Where can I get Gopher software?

Q2: What do I need to access Gopher?

Q3: Where are there publicly available logins for Gopher?

Q4: How can I add to the information in gopher?

Q5: Who Develops Gopher Software?

Q6: How can I set up a "CSO" phone book server? Where is the software?

Q7: Why can't I access the University of Minnesota's UPI news?

Q9: What are the type characters for the different Gopher Objects?

Q10: When I do full-text searches I always get every document back, Why?

Q11: When I try to build the UNIX software I get an error from make:

"Must be a separator on rules line #. Stop" Why?

Q12: What is the relationship between Gopher and (WAIS, WWW, ftp)?

Q13: Are papers or articles describing Gopher available?

Q14: On a DECstation I get the error message "/etc/svc.conf no such file

or directory" when running the gopherd server, why?

Q15: The boolean searching terms don't work for my full-text index, why?

Q16: When linking the Unix gopher server with WAIS I get undefined symbols,

Q18: Why don't my WAIS indexes work? I never get anything back for searches.

or Why do I get "Dangling file" error messages in my logfile?

Q19: My gopher server doesn't work under inetd, why?

Q20: This is not a bug report, just a curiousity. I managed to install

Q21: Help! I have PC-NFS and want to use the PC-Gopher client. How?

Q22: How do I nuke a hung TCP connection? I can't restart my UNIX

gopher server unless I get rid of it, and I don't want to reboot!
Q23: Is there somewhere I can retrieve a list of announced gopher

links? I'd like to keep a local, up-to-date list of available gopher

holes without requiring our users to gopher to umn just to scan

GopherSpace.

Q24: Why doesn't my unix gopher client display ISO-Latin-1 characters

Q25: What is veronica?

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Q0: What is Gopher?

A0: The Internet Gopher client/server provides a distributed

information delivery system around which a world/campus-wide

information system (CWIS) can readily be constructed. While

providing a delivery vehicle for local information, Gopher

facilitates access to other Gopher and information servers

throughout the world.

-------------------------------------------------------------------

Q1: Where can I get Gopher software?

A1: via anonymous ftp to boombox.micro.umn.edu. Look in the directory

/pub/gopher

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Q2: What do I need to access Gopher?

A2: You will need a gopher "client" program that runs on your local PC

or workstation

There are clients for the following systems. The directory

following the name is the location of the client on the anonymous

ftp site boombox.micro.umn.edu (134.84.132.2) in the directory

/pub/gopher.
Unix Curses & Emacs : /pub/gopher/Unix/gopher1.12.tar.Z

Xwindows (athena) : /pub/gopher/Unix/xgopher1.2.tar.Z

Xwindows (Motif) : /pub/gopher/Unix/moog

Macintosh Hypercard :

/pub/gopher/Macintosh-TurboGopher/old-versions *

Macintosh Application : /pub/gopher/Macintosh-TurboGopher *

DOS w/Clarkson Driver : /pub/gopher/PC_client/

NeXTstep : /pub/gopher/NeXT/

VM/CMS : /pub/gopher/Rice_CMS/ or /pub/gopher/VieGOPHER/

VMS : /pub/gopher/VMS/

OS/2 2.0 : /pub/gopher/os2/

MVS/XA : /pub/gopher/mvs/

Many other clients and servers have been developed by others, the

following is an attempt at a comprehensive list.

A Macintosh Application, "MacGopher".

ftp.cc.utah.edu:/pub/gopher/Macintosh *

Another Macintosh application, "GopherApp".

ftp.bio.indiana.edu:/util/gopher/gopherapp *

A port of the UNIX curses client for DOS with PC/TCP

oac.hsc.uth.tmc.edu:/public/dos/misc/dosgopher.exe
A port of the UNIX curses client for PC-NFS

bcm.tmc.edu:/nfs/gopher.exe

A beta version of the PC Gopher client for Novell's LAN Workplace

for DOS

lennon.itn.med.umich.edu:/dos/gopher
A VMS DECwindows client for use with Wollongong or UCX

job.acs.ohio-state.edu:XGOPHER_CLIENT.SHARE

* Note: these Macintosh clients require MacTCP.

Most of the above clients can also be fetched via a gopher client

itself. Put the following on a gopher server:

Type=1

Host=boombox.micro.umn.edu

Port=70

Path=

Name=Gopher Software Distribution.

Or point your gopher client at boombox.micro.umn.edu, port 70 and

look in the gopher directory.

There are also a number of public telnet login sites available.

The University of Minnesota operates one on the machine

"consultant.micro.umn.edu" (134.84.132.4) See Q3 for more

information about this. It is recommended that you run the client

software instead of logging into the public telnet login sites. A

client uses the custom features of the local machine (mouse,

scroll bars, etc.) A local client is also faster.

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Q3: Where are there publicly available logins for Gopher?

A3: Here is a short list, use the site closest to you to minimize
network lag.

Non-tn3270 Public Logins:

Hostname IP# Login Area

------------------------- --------------- ------ -------------

consultant.micro.umn.edu 134.84.132.4 gopher North America

gopher.uiuc.edu 128.174.33.160 gopher North America

panda.uiowa.edu 128.255.40.201 panda North America

gopher.sunet.se 192.36.125.2 gopher Europe

info.anu.edu.au 150.203.84.20 info Australia

gopher.chalmers.se 129.16.221.40 gopher Sweden

tolten.puc.cl 146.155.1.16 gopher South America

ecnet.ec 157.100.45.2 gopher Ecuador

tn3270 Public Logins:

Hostname IP# Login Area

------------------------- --------------- ------ -------------

pubinfo.ais.umn.edu 128.101.109.1 -none- North America

It is recommended that you run the client software instead of

logging into the public login sites. A client uses the

custom features of the local machine (mouse, scroll bars, etc.)

and gives faster response.

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Q4: How can I add to the information in gopher?

A4: You can do this by running a gopher server. Servers are available

for a number of systems. Use anonymous ftp to

boombox.micro.umn.edu (134.84.132.2) and look in /pub/gopher. The

following servers are available there:

Unix : /pub/gopher/Unix/gopherxx.tar.Z

VMS : /pub/gopher/VMS/

Macintosh : /pub/gopher/Mac_server/

VM/CMS : /pub/gopher/Rice_CMS/ or /pub/gopher/Vienna_CMS/

MVS : /pub/gopher/mvs/

DOS PC : /pub/gopher/PC_server/
When you have your server ready you can publish it to the world by

sending e-mail to the maintainters of the "Other gophers" list:

If your gopher server is in Europe, send mail to:

gopher@ebone.net
Otherwise send mail to:

gopher@boombox.micro.umn.edu

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Q5: Who Develops Gopher Software?

A5: Gopher was originally developed in April 1991 by the University

of Minnesota Microcomputer, Workstation, Networks Center to help

our campus find answers to their computer questions.

It has since grown into a full-fledged World Wide Information

System used by a large number of sites in the world.

Many people have contributed to the project, too numerous to

count.

The people behind the much of the gopher software can be reached

via e-mail at gopher@boombox.micro.umn.edu, or via paper mail:

Internet Gopher Developers

100 Union St. SE #190

Minneapolis, MN 55455 USA

Or via FAX at:

+1 (612) 625-6817

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Q6: How can I set up a "CSO" phone book server? Where is the software?
A6: CSO phone book servers are also known as "qi" servers. The

software implementation can be gotten via anonymous ftp from

uxc.cso.uiuc.edu (128.174.5.50) as /pub/qi.tar.Z. You may also

see this referred to as "ph", which is what most of the clients

are called. A collected set of clients for Macs, PCs, VMS, VM,

etc, are in the /pub/ph.tar.Z file.

There is also an archive of the mailing list for qi/ph software on

the same machine. It's in /pub/info-ph.archive. You may join the

list by sending email to info-ph-request@uxc.cso.uiuc.edu.

This software is supported by Paul Pomes <p-pomes@uiuc.edu>

Contact him for more information.

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Q7: Why can't I access the University of Minnesota's UPI news?

A7: The University of Minnesota has a site license for UPI news, we

are not allowed to distribute it off of our campus. We get our

UPI news from Clarinet. For more information about getting UPI

news send mail to info@clarinet.com. For information about

setting up your own gopher-UPI server search the gopher-news

archive for UPI.

-------------------------------------------------------------------

Q9: What are the type characters for the different Gopher Objects?

A9: Normal IDs.

0 Item is a file

1 Item is a directory

2 Item is a CSO (qi) phone-book server

3 Error

4 Item is a BinHexed Macintosh file.

5 Item is DOS binary archive of some sort.

6 Item is a UNIX uuencoded file.

7 Item is an Index-Search server.

8 Item points to a text-based telnet session.

9 Item is a binary file! Client must read until the connection

closes. Beware.

T TN3270 connection.
Experimental IDs.

s Sound type. Data stream is a mulaw sound.

g GIF type.

M MIME type. Item contains MIME data.

h html type.

I Image type.
i "inline" text type (used by panda).

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Q10: When I do full-text searches I always get every document back, Why?

A10: This is a problem occasionally encountered with Unix full-text

indexes. It is caused by setting up the link incorrectly to a

gindexd port.
The Path= field should be *blank* when pointing to a gindexd

index.

Otherwise the client will send the path to the gindexd daemon,

which interprets everything as a keyword. This path is

likely to contain a pathname that is common to all of the indexed

files. Thus a search generates hits on everything.

-------------------------------------------------------------------

Q11: When I try to build the UNIX software I get an error from make:

"Must be a separator on rules line #. Stop" Why?

A11: This is a problem with older makes that don't understand the "include"

keyword. One easy way to cope with this problem is compiling GNU

make, which does understand the include keyword.

If this is too difficult, remove the line:

include Makefile.config

from all the Makefiles and paste in a copy of Makefile.config at

the top of each Makefile.

Or, instead of pasting you can make the client/server by going

into the appropriate directory and typing:

make -f ../Makefile.config -f Makefile

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Q12: What is the relationship between Gopher and (WAIS, WWW, ftp)?
A12: Gopher is intimately intertwined with these two other systems.

As shipped the Unix gopher server has the capability to:

- Search local WAIS indices.

- Query remote WAIS servers and funnel the results to gopher

clients.

- Query remote ftp sites and funnel the results to gopher

clients.

- Be queried by WWW (World Wide Web) clients (either using

built in gopher querying or using native http querying.

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Q13: Are papers or articles describing Gopher available?

A13: Gopher has a whole chapter devoted to it in :

_The_Whole_Internet_, Ed Kroll, O'Reilly, 1992 (Editors note:

..Great book, go out and buy a bunch!)

Other references include:

_The_Internet_Gopher_, "ConneXions", July 1992, Interop.

_Exploring_Internet_GopherSpace_ "The Internet Society News", v1n2

1992,
(You can subscribe to the Internet Society News by sending e-mail to

isoc@nri.reston.va.us)

_The_Internet_Gopher_Protocol_, Proceedings of the Twenty-Third

IETF, CNRI, Section 5.3

_Internet_Gopher_, Proceedings of Canadian Networking '92

_The_Internet_Gopher_, INTERNET: Getting Started, SRI

International, Section 10.5.5

_Tools_help_Internet_users_discover_on-line_treasures, Computerworld,

July 20, 1992

_TCP/IP_Network_Administration_, O'Reilly.
Balakrishan, B. (Oct 1992)

"SPIGopher: Making SPIRES databases accessible through the

Gopher protocol". SPIRES Fall '92 Workshop, Chapel Hill, North

Carolina.

Tomer, C. Information Technology Standards for Libraries,

_Journal of the American Society for Information Science_,

43(8):566-570, Sept 1992.

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Q14: On a DECstation I get the error message "/etc/svc.conf no such file

or directory" when running the gopherd server, why?

A14: This is caused by the chroot() call in gopherd. It can be easily

fixed by running gopherd with the -c option.

Alternatively you can copy /etc/svc.conf into a directory named

"etc" inside the gopher-data directory.

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Q15: The boolean searching terms don't work for my full-text index, why?

A15: This is probably because the searching is being provided by WAIS.

WAIS opts to return all documents that contain a search phrase

within certain limits. WAIS searches do return the documents with

the highest "score" at the top, those documents will have the

closest relevance.

Alternatively you could get a booleanized version of wais from

ftp.bio.indiana.edu.

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Q16: When linking the Unix gopher server with WAIS I get undefined
symbols,

such as:

log_file_name

logfile

PrintStatus

find_value

Sources
NumSources

A17: This happens if you make gopherd before linking in the WAIS ir/ui

directories. The fix is to "make clean" or remove

gopherd/{waisgopher.o,Waisindex.o} and then remake gopherd. Or

link the ir/ui directories first.

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Q18: Why don't my WAIS indexes work? I never get anything back for searches.
or Why do I get "Dangling file" error messages in my logfile?

A18: The problem could be in the server. The server should be run

using the -c option if you want WAIS to work. Another solution is to

patch the WAIS code so that it doesn't check the files on the disk.

Search the gopher-news archive for "dangling". This will turn up a

single document with the patch.

-------------------------------------------------------------------

Q19: My gopher server doesn't work under inetd, why?

A19: It could be that your inetd server only supports a limited amount

of arguments. For instance, the maximum number of arguments to an

inetd server is 5. You can get around this by combining arguments: i.e.

gopherd -I -c
becomes:

gopherd -Ic

You may also leave the port specifier off of the command line.

The gopher server automagically finds out the port it's running on.
-------------------------------------------------------------------

Q20: This is not a bug report, just a curiousity. I managed to install

gopher on my PC, more or less by myself, which is a pretty good

accomplishment, for someone who hasn't installed hardly anything on a

PC. I then proceeded to load my PC/TCP kernel, ETHDRV, and try to

start up gopher. It said it couldn't initialize that stack(?). I have

to load this whenever I use PC/TCP. Incredibly, when I did not load

ETHDRV, Gopher came up immediately and telneted to our local server.

How does it know what kernel to load?

A20 Dr. Science says,

The Internet Gopher program is not actually computer program at

all, but a collection of magical incantations handed down from Dark

Age conjurors. It works by sending magical "demons" through the air,

which scour the world for information, and then return to cast

illusions containing the answer.

When you use the Gopher, your computer isn't actually doing

anything at all. Instead, these demons have mesmirized you with an

evil magical spell, which was invoked by the pattern of

finger-movements peculiar to the typing of the letters G-O-P-H-E-R on

your keyboard. This spell transmits demonic information directly to

your brain.
Scientists aren't certain of the long-term effects of demonic

mesmirization, although former presidents have suffered only minor

medical side-effects from it. Indeed, since Magic and Science are

usually opposed to each other, most Scientists are usually

close-minded about such issues, and will usually respond with some

vacuous non-answer about "packet drivers", "stacks", and other such

jargon.
Unlike conventional scientists, Dr. Science is very open-minded and

is willing to deal with such issues in a frank and honest manner.

This is why people come to him with questions, and why they've learned

to rely on and live by his answers.

Dr. Science

"I'm not a real doctor; I have a Master's Degree.... in SCIENCE!"

:-) :-) :-) :-)

There's always room for a little humor in a FAQ..

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Q21: Help! I have PC-NFS and want to use the PC-Gopher client. How?

A21: Use a piece of software called PKTMUX, available at fine ftp

sites everywhere. This will let you use any packet driver

application.
Or, aquire a client that supports PC-NFS. See Q2.

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Q22: How do I nuke a hung TCP connection? I can't restart my UNIX

gopher server unless I get rid of it, and I don't want to reboot!

A22:

Here is an example of using dbx to change a socket from CLOSING to

CLOSED.

# netstat -A|grep CLOSING

c4bc5100 tcp 0 11 mymachine.gopher 129.89.8.4.70 CLOSING

# dbx -k /vmunix /dev/mem

...

(dbx) 0xc4bc5100+8/1X -- display contents of PCB+8

c4bc5108: 00000007
(dbx) assign 0xc4bc5108=0 -- zero it

(dbx) q

After a minute or two, the CLOSED socket should disappear.

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Q23: Is there somewhere I can retrieve a list of announced gopher

links? I'd like to keep a local, up-to-date list of available gopher

holes without requiring our users to gopher to umn just to scan

GopherSpace.

A23: In the Unix client/server distribution is a perl script called

"gopherdist". Gopherdist can fetch the contents of any point in

GopherSpace.

To dump the contents of all the North American links from

gopher.tc.umn.edu do the following:

% gopherdist gopher.tc.umn.edu 70 "1/Other Gopher and Information

Servers/North America" > .Links

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Q24: Why doesn't my unix gopher client display ISO-Latin-1 characters

properly? BTW I'm using a Sun workstation..

A24: It is the client's problem, the server is perfectly 8-bit transparent.

The BSD curses library uses bit 8 in order to remember, whether a

character has been displayed reverse. So use just /usr/5bin/cc and

you get the System V curses version which is 8 bit clean.

Note that this may be a problem under other versions of UNIX too...

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Q25: What is veronica?

A25: veronica: Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to

Computerized Archives.

veronica offers a keyword search of most gopher-server menu titles

in the entire gopher web. As archie is to ftp archives, veronica

is to gopherspace. A veronica search produces a menu of gopher

items, each of which is a direct pointer to a gopher data source.

Because veronica is accessed through a gopher client, it is easy

to use, and gives access to all types of data supported by the

gopher protocol.

To try veronica, select it from the "Other Gophers" menu on

Minnesota's gopher server, or point your gopher at:

Name=veronica (search menu items in most of GopherSpace)

Type=1

Port=70

Path=1/veronica

Host=futique.scs.unr.edu

--

| Paul Lindner | lindner@boombox.micro.umn.edu | Slipping into madness

| | Computer & Information Services | is good for the sake

| Gophermaster | University of Minnesota | of comparison.

///// / / / /////// / / / / / / / / //// / / / / / / / /

.