Entered: in CardText on AlphaSmart Dana | Date: 20200117
I was able to trim back around 7.5gb or so of files from RPoD. I said goodbye to the TextFiles mirror, the Asatru Trove, the RFC mirror, and some redundancy in the Palm OS Software hoard. I also decided to streamline the main gophermap and link to sections instead of including them on the main start file.
I did all this after I had written a new gopherd named
. Xylophar is named after an double album I released in 2015 for my project Natanas. The gopherd is written in FreeBasic - a language that at least two other gopherds have been written in including the classic Grumpy http/ gopherd. Xylophar is small and does not do a lot of extra stuff, and this is okay because I run it in a chroot on RPoD. So even if it gets compromised it isn't going to breach my network (not that I really am thinking that'd happen anyway, all of us get hit constantly by the Chinese and other actors and my network hasn't become botnet yet).
Since there is now more room on the main menu for RPoD, I have given myself permission to add sections in the future if something should get my attention. Maybe a Gentoo section? A philosophy /occult section? A music section?
Some of the features of Xylophar:
1. files ending in .cgi are handed to the shell to execute. Type 7
parameters (in URL following a ?, and handed to the server from the client following a tab) are handled.
2. files ending in .map are treated as gophermaps (type 1) in
automatically generated directory listings. Oh yeah - Xylophar will generate a directory listing if there is no gophermap or gophermap.cgi file in the directory.
3. the code is small and similar to suckless programs, customization
takes place in the code.
4. it is licensed with the BSD license so you are free to do with it
whatever you'd like.
5. it is easy to setup and use - the makefile will do everything you
need it to, all you need to do additionally is restart xinetd (since I do not use systemd on my laptop, I didn't want to hard code that portion).
6. running a gopher server has been scientifically proven to increase
your sex appeal and popularity with your peers.
Anyways, that is what I've been up to in the past couple of days.