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2021-10-18

vger/inetd/nginx on openbsd and Linux

tags: gemini software

Somewhat late to the show, but heck:

Today I pulled together all the ingredients to create a gemini server setup using vger. Using Solenes description I set the thing up on OpenBSD first. And after I understood the details, I managed to deploy the same setup on Debian 11 as well.

It is quite a stack:

nginx will listen on port 1965 and receive requests. It will handle the tls/cert bits, and route the request in clear text on to port 11965
inetd will listen on port 11965 and call vger piping the request to vgers stdin file handle.
vger will then serve the request (/index.gmi for now) and output everything to stdout
inetd will forward the answer
nginx will forwart the answer

I can see the index.gmi file with emacs/elpher and gcat on port 1965, but I also can use printf and netcat on port 11965 bypassing all the tls bits and pieces:

me@home:~ 2 > printf "gemini://127.0.0.1/index.gmi\r\n" | netcat 127.0.0.1 11965
20 text/gemini; 
# vger on HOME system

Just to say: yes, I can!
~ew

Yay!

Why? With this setup I can experiment with writing a small special purpose gemini server component while totally ignoring the tls bits and pieces. Thanks to Omar for pointing out the stdin/stdout feature of vger, thanks to Solene to make vger a reality!

Along the way I found out a number of things about my very first instance of OpenBSD:

my pkg system seems broken somehow. I cannot list available packages any more. It did work initially. But being largely ignorant, I have no clue, where to start looking.
where is /proc/$PID/fd?
where is lsof?
where is ip? Ok, ifconfig works.
where is strace? oh, ktrace and kdump worked to tell me, what I had wrong (not enough worker threads!)
bash-completion works, but only up to a point. Whether or not I like it remains undecided.
rcctl is NOT systemctl :-)

It's small, which I like. On the other hand it's awkward for my finger habits, of course, but that had to be expected.

Life ain't no candy mountain, you know?

From the movie "Candy Mountain" :)

Cheers,

~ew

gemini://perso.pw/blog/articles/gemini-vger-server.gmi

local copy

gemini://perso.pw/blog/articles/nginx-stream.gmi

local copy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candy_Mountain

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