Date: Wed, 3 Jan 2001 17:40:05 -0500
From: David Allen <s2mdalle@titan.vcu.edu>
To: gopher@complete.org
Subject: [gopher] Correct behavior?
Message-ID: <20010103174005.A10398@mothra>
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Hello,

Recently John and I have been swapping emails about a real pain in the
ass in UMN gopherd.  On one hand, the server allows you to execute
shell scripts (gopherd then serves the output) as long as you have it
executable and it's shebanged.  (#!/bin/sh)  On the other, the default
behavior for gopherd is to chroot() for security, meaning that as far
as gopherd is concerned, /bin/sh doesn't exist.  You can act like an
FTP server and copy a bunch of utils to a local directory, but anyway...

It looks like it's pretty easy to detect the case where a shell script
bombs due to this problem.  (chroot() causing this failure).  So
what's the correct behavior in this situation?  Currently, since the
program can't execute, it's output is "" and that's exactly what's
sent to the client.  Would you say that it's appropriate for the
server to spit out an error message saying something along the lines
of "Whoops!  Something seems misconfigured here...why don't you drop
<admin@my.nifty.gopher.com> and email to let him know!"  

Or is it more appropriate to leave it the way it is?
-- 
David Allen
http://opop.nols.com/
----------------------------------------
A limerick packs laughs anatomical 
Into space that is quite economical. 
But the good ones I've seen 
So seldom are clean, 
And the clean ones so seldom are comical.