[gopher] A Gopher noob and endless questions. ;-)

[Cameron Kaiser]

Mike,

> Hey all!  I've been fooling around with pygopherd after being  
> introduced to Gopherspace a while back by a friend of mine.  ( My  
> current server - gopher://www.terminalcore.net - NetBSD 3.0 Sparc64,  
> Netra T105)
> 
> It's interesting stuff and in a lot of ways eminently better than FTP  
> or certain other serving methods.  I like it also because it doesn't  
> take up a lot of horsepower.

Nice. I'll add your site to the new gophers list, and V-2 will seed off
of that. What would you like the display string to be?

> One thing I noticed is that there doesn't seem to be an easy way to  
> make a front-end authentication page if you wanted part of your Gopher  
> server to be secure.  (At least I didn't see a way.)

Unfortunately no, unless you wrote some custom server that required
signed credentials on each access. This would of course probably demand
a custom client. 

> Can this be done with +ASK?  Does anybody have an example of using  
> +ASK that doesn't make my head hurt?

+ASK could handle the form, but the server would still have to enforce
the security. I suppose you could have a mole as a front end, but I would
have to think about the potential gaps in that. Or, you could use itemtype
7, though this is a little more opaque. And, of course, Gopher over TLS or
SSL has been proposed but not ever, to my knowledge, implemented.

-- 
------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ --
  Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com
-- Things get complicated when you get past eighteen. -- The Statler Brothers -