[gopher] Re: Active ?

[John Burnett <jburnett58@comcast.net>]

On Thu, Aug 17, 2006 at 07:00:02PM +0200, Stegozor wrote:
> On 8/17/06, JumpJet Mailbox <jumpjetinfo@yahoo.com> wrote:
> >
> >   Neither gopher://alessandro.route-add.net  or gopher://gopher.rp.spb.su are accessable from Port 70.  This is probably due to these Gopher servers being removed from Internet service.
> >
> >   The error you are experiencing appears to NOT be a issue with your Gopher software, but an issue with your DNS server.  As you state:
> >   "When I go to a site I get mixed messages on unreachable links, one is pretty instantaneous telling me that the site is not available, the second hangs the gopher program for 2-3 minutes before telling me that it cannot connect to the host.".
> >
> >   The "instantaneous" failure is because there is no longer a physical IP address associated with the server you are trying to reach, so the DNS server sends back a quick response.  The failure that APPEARS to "hang" is because there is still an IP address associated with the unreachable servers (in the case of gopher://alessandro.route-add.net it is 192.182.210.150, and the case of gopher://gopher.rp.spb.su it is 81.3.164.16 ), and the DNS server spends a considerable amount of time trying to reach the associated pysical IP address.
> 
> Thanks for the explanation, but there's something I still don't
> understand and that seems to be a bug in Gopher client to me: when I
> press control-c during an attempt to contact these servers, I can't
> take back the control of the program, the beep (from the buzzer)
> becomes weird and repetitive and I have to close the terminal window.
> I tried the same links with SeaMonkey, simply pressing escape stops
> the transaction.

Another option is to use lynx. I don't like the interface as much as
I do the *gopher* interface but you can set the time that it will
search an IP address, ie lynx -connect_timeout=N

N is in seconds so it's pretty tweakable. The fact that it can be done
in lynx leads me to believe that it's possible to do in gopher, Yes?

Thanks,
John Burnett
Thu Aug 17 21:38:08 CDT 2006