Gophernicus is modern featured and

Gophernicus - Copyright (c) 2009-2016 Kim Holviala 

Gophernicus is a modern full-featured (and hopefully) secure gopher

Command line options:

    -h hostname   Change server hostname (FQDN)      [$HOSTNAME]

    -p port       Change server port                 [70]

    -r root       Change gopher root                 [/var/gopher]

    -t type       Change default gopher filetype     [0]

    -g mapfile    Change gophermap file              [gophermap]

    -a tagfile    Change gophertag file              [gophertag]

    -c cgidir     Change CGI script directory        [/cgi-bin/]

    -u userdir    Change users personal gopherspace  [public_gopher]

    -l logfile    Log to Apache-compatible combined format logfile

    -w width      Change default page width          [76]

    -o charset    Change default output charset      [US-ASCII]

    -s seconds    Session timeout in seconds         [1800]

    -i hits       Maximum hits until throttling      [4096]

    -k kbytes     Maximum transfer until throttling  [4194304]

    -f filterdir  Specify directory for output filters

    -e ext=type   Map file extension to gopher filetype

    -R old=new    Rewrite the beginning of a selector

    -D text|file  Set or load server description for caps.txt

    -L text|file  Set or load server location for caps.txt

    -A admin      Set admin email for caps.txt

    -nv           Disable virtual hosting

    -nl           Disable parent directory links

    -nh           Disable menu header (title)

    -nf           Disable menu footer

    -nd           Disable dates and filesizes in menus

    -nc           Disable file content detection

    -no           Disable charset conversion for output

    -nq           Disable HTTP-style query strings (?query)

    -ns           Disable logging to syslog

    -na           Disable autogenerated caps.txt

    -nm           Disable shared memory use (for debugging)

    -nr           Disable root user checking (for debugging)

    -d            Debug to syslog (not for production use)

    -v            Display version number and build date

    -b            Display the BSD license

    -?            Display this help

Setting up a gopher site

========================

After succesfully installing Gophernicus (see INSTALL) you need to set

up the gopher root directory. By default Gophernicus serves documents

from /var/gopher so start by creating that directory and making sure

t's world-readable. Then, simply add files and directories under your

Lynx) and open up this URL:

That's it, your first gopher site is now up and running. If the links

on the root menu don't work make sure you are using the -h 

nstead of  - see INSTALL).

Security

========

Gophernicus has been written with high security in mind. There should

be no buffer overflows or memory allocation problems so it should be

However, the security settings (which are non-changeable) are so strict

that you need to keep one thing in mind. Gophernicus will only serve

enough, all files and directories MUST be world-readable or they are

Gophermaps

==========

By default all gopher menus are automatically generated from the

content of the directory being viewed. If you want to have

nformational text along with the files, or if you want to completely

Gophertags

==========

A gophertag file can be used to virtually rename a directory. Let's

assume that you have a directory called "foo" somewhere - it will

be listed as "foo" in all automatically generated menus. Now if you

create a file foo/gophertag and put the text "bar" into it the menus

useful for creating descriptive names for directories without

littering the file system with spaces and weird characters.

=====================

Gophernicus supports users personal gopherspaces. If a user has

that directory.

Virtual hosting

===============

Gophernicus supports virtual hosting, or serving more than one logical

To enable virtual hosting create one or more directories under your

Almost.

To make gopher clients work properly with virtual hosting, create a

character to create a list of all available virtual hosts (see

README.gophermap). The generated virtual host links will be created so

that standard gopher clients will find the correct domain even when

they don't specifically tell the server which host they're trying to

CGI support

===========

Gophernicus supports most parts of the CGI/1.1 standard. Most standard

CGI variables are set, and some non-standard ones are added.

By default all scripts and binaries under any directory called

/cgi-bin/ are executed as CGI scripts (this includes cgi-bin

s marked executable it is also processed as an CGI script.

As with regular files, CGI scripts must be world-executable (and

Output filtering and PHP support

================================

t on by using the -f  option, creating that directory

and creating one or more scripts in there named by either the file

file to client the output filter script is executed with the

original file as the first parameter and the output of the script

s then sent to client.

For PHP support install the CLI version of the PHP interpreter and

then symlink (or copy) that binary to the directory specified with

-f option using the destination name "php".

$ ln -s /usr/bin/php5-cli /usr/lib/gophernicus/filters/php

After that all files with the php suffix will be "filtered" through

the PHP command line interpreter. In other words, PHP starts working.

And don't use the CGI version of PHP as it outputs HTTP headers the

Charset support and conversions

===============================

Gophernicus supports three charsets: US-ASCII, ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8.

All textual input is internally upconverted to UTF-8 and then

conversion is input autosensing which means that you don't have to

t's all detected automatically.

With standard gopher clients this is a bit of a problem as your text

files WILL be converted to 7-bit US-ASCII. This means that all 8-bit

charaters WILL BE LOST. This decision was made because no gopher

client that I tested was reliably cabable of decoding anything else

than pure US-ASCII. If you want to disable the conversion use the

"-no" option, or if you'd like to change the default output charset to

option.

Selector rewriting

==================

Selector rewriting lets you rewrite parts of the selector on the fly.

Well, not parts, but really just the start of it. And the rewrite

enging here is nothing like Apache's mod_rewrite as I was too lazy

to integrate any regex libraries... So, all it does is rewrite a

fixed string at the start of the selector to something else. This

existing deeplinks still work.

Examples:

  -R "/~user=/~luser"

  -R "/old-dir=/new-dir"

Session tracking and statistics

===============================

To enable virtual hosting with gopher (RFC1436) clients Gophernicus

tracks users and their session. As a side effect of that session

tracking, Gophernicus has simple throttling controls to keep nasty

users from killing your precious 120MHz PPC 604e server from dying

under the load. The throttling defaults are high enough that normal

The current sessions and other real-time status data can be viewed

by opening the URL gopher:///0/server-status . This status

view has been modeled after the Apache server-status which means

that it's possible to integrate Gophernicus into existing server

monitoring systems. To ease up such integrations, Gophernicus