Digging My Own Grave

And so finally, a year later, Somnolescent’s Gopher is reborn.

Somnolescent's new Gopher server

My interest in this blog waxes and wanes; usually it comes down to if I have something to say, and there just haven’t been a lot of new developments in the past week since the Information Repository went up. “Oh, I got another menu done.” Kickass, Cammy. “I was trying to install a CCSO server but I’m getting errors even the maintainer can’t fix.” Gosh, how exciting. Thankfully, now, we’ve got something to discuss.

I decided early on I didn’t want to go for the “menu per person” approach because it leaves out pretty much everyone but me and dcb, and it goes a bit against what I believe Gopher’s strength is, information retrieval. Instead, I dedicated each menu to a specific project. As of right now, aphrodisiac, AutoSite, Pennyverse, Pituophis/Gophew, and w2krepo have menus, plus one for my catalogued essays in text files. The recaps are also up on the Gopherhole for the sake of giving people something to check back on.

I also decided that the Gopherhole would be good for more behind-the-scenes, outtake-y sorts of materials, stuff I want out there but is unfinished or I’m embarrassed by. If that’s your bag, keep hovering it, there’ll be more soon. There’s already some unreleased aphrodisiac tracks, including an alternate mix of “Yellow Bug”, one of the mtlx tracks from that EP I still need to finish.

Gophew performing a very important search for best AutoSite

Also, there’s search. I wrote enough about Gophew in the upcoming recap, but with a good client, you can now search across our server if you’re looking for a specific WMP skin or stuff about Giulio or something.

I’m about dulled to it now, but I think it turned out pretty nicely. Really, I’m just glad to have the thing back up after a year of “I’ll get back to it someday”. I have some more Pennyverse bios to rewrite and I’ll have to get my old stories on there (skipped it for now, couldn’t be assed), but for now? Finished.

Of course, I never quite know when to quit, so I still have two more ideas for ways to upgrade it for when when my brain stops bleeding…

CCSO

CCSO is even more obscure than Gopher. There’s about 400 Gopherholes still in existence, but only nine CCSO servers. It’s an early digital phone book format, later supplanted by LDAP and about a million OEM solutions businesses jam together. Somnolescent’s angling to have the tenth CCSO server still in existence…if I can get Qi going, Qi being CCSO’s reference server software package.

Now, Michael Lazar (the mozz.us guy?) did manage to get Qi to compile with modern gcc, and he has his setup up on GitHub in a Dockerfile (Docker being the industry standard “container”, read “kinda sorta lightweight virtual machine”, format). Problem is that Docker for Raspbian falls pretty firmly under the “we support it because it’s *nix, not because we want to” header, and setup was kind of a fucking shitshow.

Docker not really totally supporting Raspbian
The only way out is through the perfume department :weary:

Even after I got Docker ostensibly working, I wasn’t able to build Qi inside the container. Permission errors for a script that didn’t actually exist, naturally.

make[1]: execvp: /opt/nameserv/source/bin/install.sh: Permission denied

Unfortunately, Michael himself had no clue about it when I asked and was even able to get the Dockerfile working out-of-the-box on MacOS and CentOS, which is a pretty clear sign it’s something weird with Raspbian’s Docker. I asked about skipping the Dockerfile and running the thing directly on the Pi, and he said it was definitely possible, so I’ll give it a shot later. Failing that, I’ll poke dcb about writing us a CCSO library in Python perhaps. Either way, it’s just absurd enough that Somnolescent needs one.

Native Gopherlens

Gopherlens is dcb’s Pituophis-powered Gopher proxy. I actually much prefer it to Floodgap’s proxy, just being nicer to look at and avoiding the feeling that Cameron Kaiser is actively judging what I browse. (Plus, his proxy is actually broken on our Gopher server at the moment, totally discarding the informational selectors for lack of host. Naturally, no other client I’ve seen has an issue with it.)

Gopherlens displaying our Gopher server
Mmm, clean. Nice use of color too, color is underrated in Gopher clients.

Gopherlens is a bit hacked together, and I’ve always had issues with its stability, so I can never quite recommend it out. Last night, dcb suggested running Gopherlens directly on the Pi, where accessing gopher.somnolescent.net over HTTP (port 80) would still work, just through Flask instead. After a bit of discussion about if the Pi can handle filebase + Gopher + CCSO + proxy duty (it probably can), I added it to the upgrade pile. The top-level site can do with a Gopher portal page too, come to think of it…

Either way, for now? That’s about it. Me, I’m just waiting on June so I can get back to thinking about furry fantasy lads instead of server configuration. Been about three months of straight techie stuff and gosh I miss talking characters with my Caby. Nothing but that stuff next month. Gonna be good.

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