Re: [gopher] A Gopher noob and endless questions. ;-)
On Apr 7, 2010, at 9:59 AM 4/7/10, Cameron Kaiser wrote:
Mike,
Hey all! I've been fooling around with pygopherd after being
introduced to Gopherspace a while back by a friend of mine. ( My
current server - gopher://www.terminalcore.net - NetBSD 3.0 Sparc64,
Netra T105)
It's interesting stuff and in a lot of ways eminently better than FTP
or certain other serving methods. I like it also because it doesn't
take up a lot of horsepower.
Nice. I'll add your site to the new gophers list, and V-2 will seed
off
of that. What would you like the display string to be?
The Terminal Core is good. (That's a FLCL reference for any anime
fans out there.)
One thing I noticed is that there doesn't seem to be an easy way to
make a front-end authentication page if you wanted part of your
Gopher
server to be secure. (At least I didn't see a way.)
Unfortunately no, unless you wrote some custom server that required
signed credentials on each access. This would of course probably
demand
a custom client.
As I suspected. I could do it using IP blocking at the firewall or
port knocking or something equally nutty but those have serious issues.
Can this be done with +ASK? Does anybody have an example of using
+ASK that doesn't make my head hurt?
+ASK could handle the form, but the server would still have to enforce
the security. I suppose you could have a mole as a front end, but I
would
have to think about the potential gaps in that. Or, you could use
itemtype
7, though this is a little more opaque.
So let me ask you this then - does the +ASK form have the ability to
populate a text file? If so then I just thought of something.
You could have a daemon running in the background that checks the text
file for name:passwd then fires up a server session on a particular
port. The gophermap behind the ask form would have custom links for
each user. The links would only then be active if someone has logged
in via the +ASK form. Put a logoff +ASK form in the user gopherspace
and give the daemon a timeout ability to kill the special server
session and the user gopherspace would then only be available when
someone was properly logged in.
It's a kludge and it doesn't provide password security but it would
work in theory. (Provided I don't have the capabilities of +
ASK wrong in my head - I'm still very fuzzy on a lot of Gopher stuff.)
Also you'd have to define a range of ports in the firewall as
dedicated Gopher ports.
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.
--
Mike
"All we wanna do is eat your brains! We're not unreasonable, I mean no
one's gonna eat your eyes." - Re: Brains, Jonathan Coultan
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