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Bradley D. Thornton Bradley at NorthTech.US
Thu Mar 11 08:22:07 GMT 2021
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On 3/10/2021 2:53 AM, Nathan Galt wrote:
On Wed, Mar 10, 2021, at 1:51 AM, Bradley D. Thornton wrote:
...the kewlest
part about that, and one reason I don't want webproxies on my lawn, is
because I make those archives available exlusively via Gemini (Maybe
Gopher too, I'll have to check lolz)
If you want to transfer files over an uncommon protocol that most people can't use, have you considered (S)FTP? Chrome dropped FTP support in version 88 and version 89 is the current version.
FTP is ubiquitous. What would be the point? And why would you suggestSFTP, when the standard is anonymous FTP?
Some of those resources:
ftp://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/archlinux/iso/
ftp://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/amd64/iso-cd/
ftp://sunsite.icm.edu.pl/pub/(https://sunsite.icm.edu.pl/ - most links point to ftp://)
ftp://slackware.cs.utah.edu/slackware/
ftp://ftp.swin.edu.au/
For webhosting customers, I require that they use SSH - SCP, SFTP - butbut those SSH methods are intended for the manipulation of files, whileanyone can browse and download from anonymous FTP or Gopher (or Gemini)
Although it is *theoretically possible* to enable anonymous SFTP, howwould you do it without incorporating PAM or letting someone who hasnever visited before to leave the password field blank? In anonymous FTPthe password field by historical convention is your email address, orsome/any email address, like... billg at microsoft.com, although browsersdo it a bit differently.
Now, you can surely enable FTPS, but then we're back to that wholegarbage situation about whether this is explicit or implicit, and indeciding between these two control ports, are we going to be using TCP21 (explicit) or 990 (implicit), and data on 989, in a range between3000-3050, or port 20 (implicit & active)???
I even confuse myself when I try to remember how to firewall theclusterbucket that are the FTPS'es.
Good ole anonymous FTP is well known (You say uncommon) and 20/21 workjust fine.
The only problems I've had with FTP during the past 40 years were due toacoustic couplers or shitty phone lines.
Gopher satisfies this easily with a single connection over port 70.
And Gemini does the same thing w/TLS over port 1965. That sounds like awinner to me.
I probably should [not] mention that it appears as if gophers:// may bedoing the same over port 70 as well in many cases, in the not toodistant future, but I might get flamed for even bringing that up at thistime. Since I have taken it upon myself to mention that, port 70 isalready registered and I personally like the idea of using thatparticular port for both gopher:// and gophers://.
You're welcome anytime to access Vger through SSH or Telnet though. Iactually do support that too.
(Personally, I'm amused by how FTP has become _indie_ in the span of a year or two. NNTP and Gopher threw a great welcoming party.)
Nathan, pardon me, but I'm getting the sense that you're seeing thingsthrough the lens of a world where everything should occur within theconfines of Faceplant and InstaSpam running inside of a JSRE (JavaScriptRuntime Environment) - which is exactly what you've pointed out thatChrome versions
= v88 have now effectively become... Which is also oneof the big reasons that Project Gemini was spawned.
As far as NNTP and Gopher are concerned, both Usenet and Gopher arealive and well, and enjoying a significantly relevant level of usage andtraffic. For that matter, so is FidoNet - I'm still running the samenode number I've had for the past 30 years (1:102/127).
With the exception of the Google JSRE, SFTP, Gemini, and Good oleanonymous FTP, everything else mentioned is indeed *retro*, althoughthat doesn't make those facilities non-relevant or insignificant, andthey're actually thriving more now than any of them were ten years ago.
Also: why would you want to burden Gemini-client implementers with having to handle transfer encodings when you can just gzip (or .xz, or whatever the new hotness is) for small numbers of largish files?
It works fine now, and just like there will be a substantially greaterpresence of Gopher over TLS in the future, people who develop Geminiserver and client software will innovate as well (there's been an awfullot of that in the past six months alone). Such innovations areinevitable - changing the spec is not even relevant in that regard, noris it necessary.
Please do note however, that in each of those FTP archives I postedlinks to above .iso images are *not*, as you encourage, tarballed. Norare many of the other resources.
Another nice thing about Gemini, Gopher, and FTP, is that in manyclients you can actually view of the file types you're browsing rightinside the client. I understand Google affected some changes to that intheir JSRE prior to dropping support for FTP, necessarily forcing anexternal application load? Doesn't matter, moot point now anyway lolz.
If you go back and reread what I wrote in my previous post, I'm notasking anyone to write or develop anything - I was simply musing. Like Ijust said, this sort of file transfer of repo data over Gemini worksfine right now as it is.
On another note, I am *still* encouraging the authors of Gemini clientsoftware to work towards a consensus for the handling of preformattedtext blocks that people who are blind might consider to be *noise* -that's kinda a big deal to me, and Devin posted again just today on thatimportant topic.
Final thought: I haven't used Chrome at all in many years. MostlyFirefox, or Chromium, and surfing FTP repos continues to work just finein Vivaldi too.
I hope that helps :)
Kindest regards,
-- Bradley D. ThorntonManager Network Serviceshttp://NorthTech.USTEL: +1.310.421.8268