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sdf gopher servers
September 29th, 2018
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As many of you are aware, sdf.org recently performed some
upgrading which somehow disrupted their gopher servers. As
a result, everything reverted to being run off bucktooth instead
of gophernicus. After a bunch of prodding on bboard, sdf.org was
reverted to gophernicus, but a very out-of-date version.
Gopher.club, the preferred DNS mirror of SDF for gopher according
to its tutorials, is still left using bucktooth.
There's a few painful parts to this. A few of the more active
gopher users hosting on SDF were actively using the cgi script
features of gophernicus which were not a part of bucktooth's
offering. As a result, some of their gopher holes failed to load
at all, or loaded incorrectly. Second, the constant changes in
server info means that our aggregators keep triggering as if
everyone on SDF posted new content. I know this has been
a challenge for logout [0] whose Bongusta! [1] aggregator has been
affected. It's also affected my moku-pona listings [2].
As a result, for the time being I have reverted all SDF
gopherholes to using the sdf.org domain instead of gopher.club in
my listings. This way they will display correctly at least. Sadly,
gophernicus outputs server information in a footer of gophermaps,
so it will likely continue to trigger the mass-update phenomenon
whenever NetBSD or gophernicus itself are updated. I think we've
all learned to work around this by now, though.
Finally, I've posted about all this on the sdf.org bboard in
a single requests post. I'm hopeful that seeing it all clearly
outlined will help the admins update gophernicus to the latest
version and get gopher.club back in line. Time will tell! If you
continue to see mass-updates on the aggregators I apologize, but
there's limited control unless I go through manually to clean
everything up each time (like logout does). It'll settle down
eventually.
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