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Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2012 with funding from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign http://archive.org/details/uiucnet69293univ UMTVERStTY OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY M URBANA-CHAMPA1GN A Publication of the Computing and Communications Services Office UNIV OF ILL, JAN 2 5 1993 The University of Illinois Campus Network Vol. 6 No. 1 Dec. 1992 -Jan. 1993 Icon Key Exploring the Power of Novices the Internet Gopher INTERNET TREASURES of the Golden Gophers) in an effort to Experienced users provide the UM students and staff with a flexible Campus-Wide Information Sys- tem (CWIS) for disseminating news, an- nouncements, and other kinds of informa- Network Administrators now, most UlUCnet users have at tion to the university community. In order MSS\ least heard about gopher. The furry to make it easy for departmental informa- Bylittle rodent who burrows through tion providers to maintain control over AISS clients gopherspace on the Internet has been fea- their own data, the gopher team sought to tured twice in CCSO's Updates newsletter develop a "distributed document delivery (vol. 3 no. 4 and vol. 3 no. 8) and once in system"—that is, a system in which the Everyone the semi-monthly UIUC faculty/staff data could physically reside on multiple newspaper Inside Illinois (vol. 12 no. 11). computers in multiple locations. Their National publications for computing and solution was a TCP/ IP-based client-server Platform/Operating System networking professionals and hobbyists protocol and a set of applications that pro- (e.g., MacWeek, Network World, Computer vided for the coordination and linking of Shopper) have also been tracking the devel- {continued on page 2) HH opment of this increasingly popular and PC compatibles (DOS™) ubiquitous Internet tool. So, ^^ whyanotherarticleabout //^\*gr gopher? Well first, if you haven't yet read about or Macintosh™ seen gopher, you should make a point ^ "*** of it. Gopher is the S3 X Window System™ only application that truly makes navigating and using many services on the In- ternet as natural as choosing an H NeXT™ entree from a dinner menu. Yet, for all its elegant simplicity, there is tremendous power behind gopher's intuitive interface. CCSO'S IBM™ VMD Unleashing this power is a matter of un- mainframe, VMD derstanding a little bit about how gopher works and discovering some of its less obvious capabilities. UNIX™ mainframes and workstations E Back to Basics For the sake of the uninitiated, let's review a little bit about the history and PH nature of the Internet gopher. Gopher was Any platform born at the University of Minnesota (home Gopher... the server to which it is linked. Today abreast of the latest server software re- most servers contain more than just text leases and be willing to upgrade the server (continued from page 1) files and links to other servers. In addition as necessary. Although the Unix-based servers across cam- to holding hundreds of text files, the main server is the most powerful, it is also pos- ^^^TulPaf^Raame time presenting gopher server here at UIUC (a NeXT work- sible to set up a gopher server with limited that information to the end-user in a way station) includes an engine for browsing capabilities on a Macintosh or PC. Such such that it all appears to come from the and downloading files from popular ftp servers might be appropriate for a small same place. sites, gateways to the archie file archive department that wants to publish its own Over the last two years, gopher has database and the WAIS (Wide Area Infor- text-based information but does not have evolved from a system primarily intended mation Servers) distributed-database sys- the resources to purchase and maintain a to distribute text documents to a highly tem, direct links to several types of elec- complex Unix workstation. customizable environment for providing tronic phone books, the ability to do full- Now let's consider the client side of access to many different types of files and text searches on many of the documents gopher. The client is the computer and popular network services. Gopher has archived on our local server and remote software that communicates with the been adopted by hundreds of sites across text databases, preconfigured telnet ses- server. It provides a friendly front-end for the Internet—including the University of sions for connecting to popular electronic the end-user to view and select the ser- Illinois—as the CWIS/information server library catalogs and information servers vices available on the server and all its of choice. Today, the same method that across the Internet, and, of course, links to links. Gopher clients have been developed was used to link multiple servers at the every other gopher server in the world and for many different types of computers and University of Minnesota campus is now all the unrestricted services they offer. operating systems and often differ in terms article used to link gopher servers all over the The Minnesota gopher development of "look and feel" (see the related on globe. The result is a seamless network of team is constantly working on expanding page 8, "How Six Gopher Clients Stack information servers, all of which can be the capabilities of the server software. In Up" ) . Nevertheless, all gopher clients have easily accessed through a single, menu- order to maintain a state-of-the-art gopher several features in common. driven interface. server, the server administrator must keep (continued on page 3) Due to the superhuman efforts of co- administrators Paul Gibbs and Lynn Bilger, the University of Illinois gopher service is Gopher Object Types now internationally recognized as one of the best in gopherspace. Later on, we'll Normal Types: investigate some of its features in detail. But, if you haven't yet had a chance to Item is a file access gopher or want to know how you 1 Item is a directory can use it to distribute your own informa- 2 Item is a CSO (qi) phone-book server tion, get a copy of the document called 3 Error Gopher at the University of Illinois, available in the rack just outside the CCSO Resource 4 Item is a BinHexed Macintosh file Center, 1420 DCL (you can also request a 5 Item is DOS binary archive of some sort copy by sending an e-mail message with 6 Item is a UNIX uuencoded file your campus mail address to uiucnet 7 Item is an Index-Search server ©uiucedu). This document provides all 8 Item points to a text-based telnet session the information necessary to get started 9 Item is a binary file with gopher. It describes what gopher is, connection summarizes what's contained in the UIUC T TN3270 gopher server, outlines the numerous methods for accessing gopher, and enu- Experimental Types: merates the many options for getting in- formation into gopher. s Sound type. Data stream is a mulaw sound g GIF type Gopher Server(s) and Clients M MIME type. Item contains MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Like so many networked applications Extensions) data today, gopher exploits the client-server h html type. (HyperText Markup Language used by the World Wide model. The server is the machine that holds and organizes the data. To a certain Web, a hypertext application for finding and accessing resources extent, what you can do with gopher de- on the Internet) pends on your server. A very simple server I Image type might only hold plain text files. By linking i "inline" text type (used by panda, a proprietary version of gopher this simple server to another gopher server, used at the University of Iowa) however, users have access to information and services on both the simple server and 004.66977344 . 1X17 V.k L5>( Dec. 1992 -Jan. 1993 3 Gopher... The CMS client on VMD can display the displayed in the menu on the client, 3) a of files assigns the label selector string for retrieving the object (usu- (continued from page 2) names sound and <sound> to them, but cannot play them. ally the directory or path in which the The most obvious similarity among PC Gopher II, on the other hand, doesn't object is located), 4) the domain name of gopher clients is that the information and even know about sound files. It can nei- the host on which the object resides, and 5) services available on the server are pre- ther display their names nor play them. the telnet port number that listens for re- sented to the end-user as a series of nested Suffice it to say, not all gopher servers and quests on that host. The raw information menus. This type of menu structure is clients are created equal. transmitted from server to client for item 1 intended to resemble a hierarchical file in the menu above looks like this: system, a concept already familiar to most A Gopher Conversation computer users. When a user first con- Before leaving the topic of clients and Welcome to the U of Illinois Gopher nects to a server, he or she sees the top- servers, it's worth taking a few moments O/Welcome gopher.uiuc.edu 70 level menu. This is more or less equivalent to consider what actually takes place dur- to the "root" directory of a tree-structured ing a gopher session. When you start The first symbol in the text stream file system. Like a root directory, the top- gopher, your client opens a TCP connec- (shown in black ink) is the object type, in "0". level menu often contains files and other tion with a gopher server (usually the server this case Every item displayed in a menus, which are analogous to at the address specified in the client's con- gopher menu has an object type associated subdirectories (or folders) in a file system.