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[The following is a message sent by Eric Enwall to the gopher-news mailing list, describing how he set up FTPd for gopher access. He goes thru step by step describing some of the things that confused him, so it might well be useful to other users, so I have, with his permission, included it with the FTPd distribution - Peter] From: "Eric Enwall" <elenwall@chemdept.chem.uoknor.edu> To: gopher-news@boombox.micro.umn.edu Subject: A minimal Mac gopher using FTPd I was asked by a Mac type about setting up a gopher server and I wrote an explanation of how I had done it. Some folks have recently asked about gophers on Mac and so I decided to mail this on. If you are an experienced gopher person, or don't have any truck with Macs hit kill now. This is an attempt to cover things a a very simple level so I'm sure most of you won't want to wade through it. Besides, its pretty long and I've added some justification in places. A Minimal Gopher Server using Peter Lewis's FTPd--There and Back Again or Why I did it and how. As the 'by default' computer guru in a modest Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry with a small budget I try to anticipate what the boss will ask of me so that if possible it's ready before the demand. This is usually good for the reputation and often for the health of the stomach as well. I expect that we will want to be providing information about our department over the Internet in the near future. Gopher provides (IMHO) by far the easiest interface for the inquirer after information. Because of the UMinn folks' server code for Macs (and now even more because of Peter's FTPd for the Mac it is very inexpensive (read cheap) to provide the service if one has internet connected LocalTalk nets, as we do. We do not anticipate vast amounts of traffic on a server dedicated to purveying departmental information. Nor will we have tens of megabytes of information available. Thus a resurrected SE/20 with a keyboard shared with the POPMail server next to it will suffice. It's handy that it resides in my office for monitoring and certainly I'd recommend that you have the Gopher machine next to you until you get it up and running on FTP and Gopher. I make too many small errors in doing these things to permit walking down the hall to check the log. We also don't expect rampant vandalism to constantly attack the Gopher server, but the fact that it is a small, easily backed up and recovered machine will let us survive such pea-brains as do find us. It is also of utmost importance (e.g. Kelly Wainwright's letter to gopher news) that we have mechanisms so that low tech users can update information in gopher servers. Our secretaries must be able to use simple tools (Fetch?) or the usual Mac drag and drop mechanism to deposit new or altered files. Mail would be better, but on the Mac I think that's a ways away. Almost all that you need to know is in Peter's documentation, but I spent really quite a while spinning around from error (all mine) to error. At one point I decided that the progs were not working right and composed a long letter to Peter with quotes from the docs to show where I was having trouble. Some things were solved as I tried to document things in the letter, and then Farhad's mail recommending FTPd to the gopher-news group came in. I believe and trust Farhad. I don't always agree with him, but if he thinks it works, it must work. In addition, all the things I have used of Peter's (FTPd 1 and Talk) have been slick and pretty clean. It must work. After another few thousand errors, it does and this is how I did it. Your mileage may vary, but this recipe could save you some problems. Running System 7 with file sharing turned on, I had first named the hard drive with a meaningful name of CGofer. Do this before turning filesharing on! Then using the File Sharing Monitor in the control panels, give the machine a sensible name (Appleshare updaters will find the machine in the chooser.) Here I turned file sharing on so that I could let up the various privileges as I went. I think that it might be better to wait until all folders etc are made before assigning any since this is where I often made mistakes. In addition to the System folder, I generated a Utilities, FTP, and GopherTop, folder. I also now copied over the folder of FTPd-201 as downloaded. Inside GopherTop I created OUChemGopher (a folder). You may notice my careful avoidance of spaces in names. This will make it easier for some FTPers to work in the system. I also now copied in files and folders of information from an earlier incarnation of this gopher which ran on the UMinn server (which also works well). These all are in the GopherTop folder. Selecting these files and folders I made aliases (select them all, make alias under the file menu) and then dragged all the aliases to OUChemGopher folder. Inside the OUChemGopher I now changed the names of the alias files to simple, short, meaningful names. This makes a more presentable menu to the inquirer. At this time would be a good time to decide if your gopher will have links to any other gophers. I want to have three: one to the main OU gopher (which does not now exist, so I will wait on that), one to the HOME gopher at UMinn, and one to the list of all gophers also at UMinn. This is best done by using Turbogopher as described in the FTPd docs. I made two exported bookmarks files with Turbo, one for home and one for sites and copied them to CGopher. You can leave them at the top level, they are only to be read once. This can be done later as well, but if you are planning ahead, do it now. Now, turn on file sharing if it's not on. If you are experienced in setting privileges on Sys 7 you can skip the next bit. But set the privs on thing now. If you are not, as I am not, this is how I do it. Set a owner name and a GOOD password, it's security time now! If you will have trusted users who are to update files in the FTP and/or Gopher areas (for me they are the same areas), then you should use the users and groups control panel to do the job. I created one group, gopherites, with all the trusted users, assigned IDs, passwords etc at this point. That is the group with change privs on the two folders. Select the hard drive. Under the file menu select sharing... and set access to see folders, see files, for the everyone entry and also to make changes for owner and group (unless you won't ever let anyone make changes remotely, then leave that one unchecked.) Here it is also easiest to check the box 'make all currently enclosed folders like this one.' Click the go away box and allow the changes to be made. Understand that appleshare users can now see your entire disk. You may want to now set sharing on all folders except FTP and GopherTop (my names) so that no one except the owner can see in them. Hurrah! You are now ready to do something with FTPd. FTPd Setup actually. Peter says you don't have to run this often. I hope he's right in your case, I've run it at least 20 times now, getting things correct and just experimenting. You can just start at the top of the File menu and work down. Privileges...: This is I think well explained by Peter. I set for Shared Folders, owner=full users=upload, guests=read only. All other privs I set to none. This demon Peter has made this demon very capable, but you better be very capable and very careful if you enable any privs higher than the ones I have set. Except for allowed connect times I left other stuff at the defaults (since this is a stand alone server.) Preferences...: Here I only changed three things from the defaults. I set max users to 5 (on this slow machine I thought it best, but I have no real reason for doing it.) I changed the text file creater to be BBedit (which I like a lot more than teachtext.) This is done via a SFGet type dialog the way most modern apps do it. Just navigate the file tree until you find the editor program you want to to be the creator and select it with the OPEN button. Not really obvious, but hey hacking that routine is a pain. Of course one needs to check allow Gopher connections. User Directories...: Here is the point where things were fuzzy to me, and where I spent most of my time. You will need at least four users defined: the owner, anonymous, Gopher, and GopherRoot. The owner's user directory should either be /, /CGofer, or /CGofer/FTP or whatever you have called the equivalents. (For Mac types with no Un*x experience, these are the paths to the folders in Un*x form.) The user directory for anonymous should be /CGofer/FTP (in my naming choices.) GopherRoot is /CGofer/GopherTop and Gopher's directory is /CGofer/GopherTop/OUChemGopher. You need to consider the case of other users, especially those you want to update the files to be served by gopher. I originally planned to enter everyone in this dialog with their own directory (which would always have been /CGofer/GopherTop/OUChemGopher. Then the meaning of Default directory became clear. Since anonymous FTP users are pointed at /CGofer/FTP and gopher clients at /CGofer/GopherTop/OUChemGopher, anyone else (default) not named points at the Default directory which in my case is now set to /CGofer/GopherTop/OUChemGopher. Pardon me if this seems obvious to you. Save your changes. Gopher listing...: Again you get a standard file dialog with which you can navigate the file system to get to the folder where Gopher will display its initial listing to your users. In my case this is the OUChemGopher folder. I get there, click on the folder name and punch the button 'select foldername.' (For some reason, FTPd Setup doesn't remember this folder for itself and you will do the navigation whenever you want to add or change things. POPMail users will recognize the dialog.) This will now show a window listing the items you have placed in this folder and some active/inactive buttons. One great power in gopher is that it can point a user to information not contained on the host gopher machine. It does this by having 'links' to other gophers or to folders or files on other gophers. Here is where you created those links, either manually or as the docs tell you, by exporting bookmarks in TurboGopher. We did that way up above. I copied my two bookmark files into the folder earlier and now punched Add Bookmarks. File select the first file (Exported Bookmarks A) was the name I gave it. A link with the name gopher.tc.umn.edu is added to the window. Do it again for any more files you have. Now my first link is to the home of all gophers, I guess we could call it the Golden Gopher. Well, maybe that's too much. Anyway, gopher.tc.umn.edu is not a very good name. Few users would understand that, but it's what you get this way. If you went back via the Mac interface to change its name, you'd find no file in your folder with that name, but you'd see a !links file. What to do. Well in the time honored Mac tradition, when you don't know what to do, click, then double click. On the gopher.tc.umn.edu (or whatever your link is to.) This brings up a dialog where you can edit the link. Unless you be a fox, edit only the name. This is the same dialog you'd get if you had chosen to Add Link. You can repeat this for all the bookmarks you imported. Of course Remove Link is available to get rid of any you don't want. Finally, before saving, I suggest you Add Index Entry. Now save and quit FTPd Setup. You have finished setup on a terrific program. For $10 you get FTP that's slick, gopher that really works pretty well with easy link and alias definition in the pure Mac way, and indexing of your files. For $10! Run FTPd in the foreground to test it. The log window starts fresh each time you start up, but the log file is appended. On a busy machine you may need to prune this file occasionally. The only things I'd now suggest are: 1 make an alias to the log file and drag it to the desktop to make it more accessible 2 make sure an alias to the GopherRoot folder is in the FTP folder to make access by FTP easier. 3 send $10 to Peter! I'm happy to answer e-mail questions about all this. All errors should be ascribed to my faulty understanding. If you find errors or things which are unclear, misleading, or clumsy, please mail me and I'll update this. You will find the updated copy on cheminfo.chem.uoknor.edu port 70 as Minimal Gopher. Eric Enwall snail mail internet Eric-Enwall@uoknor.edu Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry bitnet enwall@uokucsvx University of Oklahoma Norman, OK 73019-0370 
