[gopher] Re: Security issues in Gopher?

[Emanuel Borsboom <em@nuel.ca>]

> can't really do a whole lot of damage) so I'm wondering what it
> would take for me to run gopherd as nobody - and better still, why
> people are running it as root.

I have it running as nobody and it works just fine.  I use this syntax
to start it:

/usr/local/sbin/gopherd -l /usr/local/var/log/gopherd.log -u nobody /usr/local/var/gopher-data 70

This is with an older version of gopherd, YMMV.

It's pretty safe to run gopherd as root because it chroots to your
data directory.  I preferred not to do this, though, because I wanted
to write the log elsewhere.

-- 
Emanuel Borsboom
http://www.nuel.ca/