GN Release 1.0beta
        A Free Multi-protocol Server for Gopher and HTTP


FEATURES:       ( *  means new in version 1.0)

     o  HTTP support -- GN now serves two protocols gopher and HTTP,
        the protocol used by WWW clients.  GN recognizes the protocol
        from the request and responds appropriately. This allows the
        use of WWW browsers like Mosaic in their native mode. (*)

     o  Per Directory Access control.

     o  Support for structured files.

     o  Support for compressed files.

     o  Builtin menu hierarchy searches.

     o  Free for any use, commercial or otherwise! (GNU license)

     o  Capability to decouple menus from filesystem.

AVAILABLE VIA GOPHER:

    Server: hopf.math.nwu.edu     port 70
    Get file:  gn-1.0beta.tar.Z

    You can also browse the source and documentation here.

OR BY ANONYMOUS FTP:
    FTP to: hopf.math.nwu.edu 
    Get file pub/gn/gn-1.0beta.tar.Z


Gn is a gopher/HTTP server which is written in C and runs under
UNIX.  It is freely available for any use, commercial or otherwise.
The software is freely redistributable under the terms of the GNU
public license.  There is good documentation -- three man pages and an
installation and maintenance guide.

Gn has "per directory" access control.  You can have different access
(by IP address or subnet) to every directory if you want to. You don't
need to run different servers on different ports to have different
levels of access!  

Gn supports the standard text and binary types, including sound and
image.  Index types are limited.  There is not yet support for
WAIS indices, only for programs (or shell scripts) which return
"virtual directories" and also for the "grep" type searches.  There is
no ftp daemon support.  GN runs only under inetd.  See the man page
for details.

Starting with release 1.0, the GN sever is becoming a multi-protocol
server. It will accept either gopher requests or HTTP requests and
respond appropriately.  To the maintainer this takes place
automatically with no action necessary or his or her part.

For those not familiar with it, HTTP stands for Hyper Text Transfer
Protocol and it is the underlying protocol used by WWW (World Wide
Web) browsers such as the Mosaic family or Cello.  Gopher and HTTP
each have some advantages not shared by the other.  Making GN a
multi-protocol server is an attempt to let us have our cake and eat it
too.  To see this in action try gopher://gopher.math.nwu.edu/ with a
gopher client and http://gopher.math.nwu.edu/ with a WWW client and
compare the two.  This is one server with one data directory.

One of the biggest advantages of HTTP is in the presentation layer
provided by the NCSA Mosaic browsers.  With GN release 1.0 or later it
is a fairly trivial matter to put nicely formatted text or images in
any of several formats into menus viewed by Mosaic.  Gopher client
users will not see the images.  The text can be converted to type 'i'
or ommitted at the GN maintainer's discretion.  The inlined images in
documents available from HTTP servers are more than just a cute
feature. They add functionality which is just not available from
gopher.  For example, there is a server which provides a campus maps
in text about the campus and has the feature that if you click a
building you get a new document containing describing the building and
containing a photo of it.  A Michigan State server offers a campus map
with the feature that clicking on a location in it gives an enlarged
map of that area.  These are not GN servers but these features could
be implemented using GN 1.0.

On the other hand gopher has some advantages too.  At present the
gopher protocol is much more widely used if you count the number of
servers.  Measured by network traffic the difference is smaller. Also
gopher has Veronica indexing.  Indexing is somewhat harder for
HTTP servers.

As of release 1.0 the interactive forms facility has been withdrawn
from GN.  The intent is to replace it in a future release with a
mechanism for doing forms which is compatible with what is being
done with other servers.  For GN what this will mean is a single 
simple form syntax which will result in GN using ASK blocks when
serving a gopher+ client and HTML+ forms when serving an HTTP client,
This should be done in a way that is transparent to the maintainer.


THANKS

I would like to thank the many people who have aided in the creation
of the gn package, either through writing code or finding and fixing
bugs.  They include Earle Ake, Henry Cejtin, Paul DuBois, Jishnu
Mukerji, Marko Nordberg, Stephen Trier, Ed Vielmetti, and Rico Tudor.


John Franks 	Dept of Math. Northwestern University
		john@math.nwu.edu