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

[Mike Hebel]

Kim Holviala wrote:
> On 2010-04-07 18:16, Mike Hebel wrote:
>
>>> And, of course, Gopher over TLS or
>>> SSL has been proposed but not ever, to my knowledge, implemented.
>>
>> I'm not really looking for secure Gopher but TLS/SSL would indeed rock.
>
> TLS was one of the things I originally planned for Gophernicus Server, 
> but I kinda dropped the idea because I didn't think anyone would be 
> interested.
>
> SSL (not TLS) is actually really simple with any inetd-compatible 
> server; just run the daemon with stunnel instead of inetd. Done.

So how does Gopher deal with that?  How does the client recognize 
there's a gopher protocol in the SSL stream?

> TLS requres support in the server itself, and doing it with inetd is 
> kinda stupid because inetd launches a server process per connection 
> and initalizing TLS is slooooow. With regular daemonized servers TLS 
> becomes easy because you only have to init it once.
>
> Or, that's what the big boys told me. I might try doing TLS one of 
> these days just to see whether the initialization really is that slow.

Actually if I were going to learn how to do TLS efficiently I'd look at 
the postfix code.  It is designed to do TLS and do it fast in case of 
things like mail server timeout and such.

-- 
Mike


Manamana!