Maclife 2/MACLIFE02-No-82-1995.ISO.7z/MACLIFE02-No-82.ISO/特集I/FTPd-240/Documentation/Tutorial by Eric Enwall

Text File | 1994-08-04 | 13KB | 226 lines

[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"  <[e-mail]>
To: [e-mail]
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  [e-mail]       Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry
bitnet    enwall@uokucsvx              University of Oklahoma
                                       Norman, OK  73019-0370