February 4th, 2021

I set up a gopherhole!
I had been thinking about Gopher for a little bit, and then last night
I saw a Mental Outlaw video on youtube about it.  That guy can be a little
edgy, but the video put Gopher back on my mind and I thought "damn, it seems
so easy to put together.  I might as well try it."

I couldn't sleep at all last night because I kept thinking about it, but I've
learned the hard way not to get started on a project on a weeknight when I have
work the next day.

So, during my lunch break I bought a domain to use, connected it to a linux
server I have, installed gophernicus from a package and.....it didn't work.

Why didn't it work?

Well, it took a while of me banging my head against the table until I realized
it was probably not actually listening on the ports that I had so carefully
opened on my firewall.  I tried to see if it was running anything through
systemd, but couldn't find it.

Finally, I uninstalled the package and built it from source.  That would give me
the latest version of gophernicus anyway, so it was probably smart.

Turns out, when you compile it to use systemd it tells you exactly which
commands to run to get it to actually listen.

If you somehow stumble across this phlog and think about running your own
gopherhole but made the same mistake as me and installed from a package without
much documentation, try running these two commands:

sudo systemctl enable gophernicus.socket
sudo systemctl start gophernicus.socket

The first command allows gophernicus to connect up with systemd to listen on
port 70.  The second actually starts it doing that.

Once I did that, it finally worked!

Now it's getting late; I watched a horror movie (The Lodge) with my boyfriend after
I got it working, and then started working on the actual hole content after.

I'll keep working on this page tomorrow!