Date: Mon, 11 Jul 2005 16:04:08 -0700
From: =?iso-8859-1?Q?Jeff=5FW?=<beaker@freeshell.org>
To: gopher@complete.org
Subject: [gopher] Re: which gopherd to use and other info
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 <42D2E0EF.9020407@route-add.net>
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Alessandro Selli <dhatarattha@route-add.net> wrote:

> sovietassassin@gmail.com wrote:
> > im looking to get into gophering and would like to setup my own
> > gopherd. the two main gopherd's ive found are pygopherd and the umn
> > gopherd and im currently running the umn gopherd.
>
>   Please read this piece of warning concerning UMN gopherd:
>
> Gopherd is no longer maintained.  Security holes were being found in it
> on a regular basis, and nobody really had the inclination to give it a
> thorough security audit given the fact that more advanced Gopher servers
> existed.  Therefore, I would strongly urge you *NOT* to deploy UMN Gopherd.

It's true that the old UMN Gopher server as-is is potentially a
security issue.  That said, there _are_ patches out there that
address some of the known vulnerabilities, and you can run it
chrooted to reduce your exposure.  It'll run fairly well on really
old hardware that has few other uses - I've got mine on a 20MHz
Sparc.  SDF, a public access unix system, has been running the
UMN Gopher for two or more years without incident  - at least none
that I'm aware of; YMMV... :)

Cheers,
Jeff

Ref:
SiMpLe MaChInEs - gopher://beaker.mdns.org
SDF/Freeshell - gopher://freeshell.org