[gopher] Strange implementations of "Missing file"

[Nuno J. Silva]

On 2012-05-16, Damien Carol wrote:

> The crawler sends selectors that don't exists sometimes. (Updated / removed
> / don't exists / whatever)
>
> I use to handle error like that :
> 1) parse response
> 2) Try to parse as Menu
> 3) If the first item of the menu is '3' error item type then ERROR
>
> But this method don't works. Mainly because some servers reply very odd
> responses
[...]
> => finger: /robots.txt: no such user
> gopher://holviala.com:79/0/robots.txt
[...]
> It's very strange. I can understand the "Empty String" could be an easy
> implementation. But others servers sends Menu with 0 items as info...

In the case of Kim's server, from the error message and the port number,
I guess that's just his finger daemon, but right now I can't see any
behavior at all (the connection gets closed with no response -- Kim,
those hits you got right now, that was me, apologies).

See, finger runs on port 79, and, although I don't know the protocol,
I'd guess it's simple enough and compatible in a way you can get
information using a gopher request.

-- 
Nuno J. Silva (aka njsg)
gopher://sdf-eu.org/1/users/njsg
http://njsg.sdf-eu.org/