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 DATE : 2021.01.09
 TIME : 19:45
AUTHOR : [email protected]
TITLE : GOPHERNICUS

===================================================================
Yesterday I changed my gopher server from pygopherd to gophernicus
on one of my debian stable servers. This is the server for my
self-hosted gopher site at: gopher://gopher.lottalinuxlinks.com:70

I was happily serving my gopher site with pygopherd until it
dawned on me that pygopherd is based on puthon 2 which has been
deprecated in debian. Since I run four debian stable machines, one
debian testing, and one debian sid machine, I verified, just to
be sure, that pygopherd had been removed from the debian sid and
testing repos. Realizing that this would mean that when the new
debian stable release comes out next year I would have to find a
new gopher server program, I quickly thought of the gopher server
I use on my sdf.org account, gophernicus. Gophernicus is in sid,
and will soon be in testing, but won't be in stable until the next
release.

While there is some discussion on github about forking and porting
pygopherd over to python 3, I don't like waiting; AND bonus points
go to ophernicus, since it has no dependencies other than the
standard libc libraries. AND unlike pygopherd, gophernicus is
under active development.

I could have waited, but I am impatient, so early in the morning,
at work on my $20 USD thrift store laptop, I ssh'd into my sever,
backed up the gopher site, and stopped pygopherd.

I could have stopped there and been safe, restarted pygopherd,
and waited until I was home, but like I said I am impatient. Since
gophernicus is not in the stable repos, I decided to clone the
git repo, and compile and install from source. This went off
without a hitch. I did have to make some small tweaks to the phlog
gophermap, but other than that it was dead simple. I disabled and
removed pygopherd, and then enabled and started gophernicus.

It is always a good idea to wait until you are physically at your
server machine to do something like this, but thankfully this just
worked beautifully. Total downtime was less than 5 minutes.

Easy peasy livin' greasy.

--norris

(o\_!_/o)