Yesterday I changed my gopher server from pygopherd to gophernicus on one of my debian stable servers.

I was happily serving my gopher site with pygopherd until it dawned on me that pygopherd is based on python 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.

-dsyates

(o\_!_/o)