making raw gopher and gemini requests
=====================================

gopher's probably the easiest since it's in plain text (not 
encrypted). you're just sending the path you want to request and
conneting to the hostname and port number that the gopher server
is listening on.

```
# nc note: this is interchangable with telnet if you have it
echo '/users/tftp/textfiles' | nc gopher.club 70

i[/users/tftp/textfiles/]	TITLE	null.host	1
i		null.host	1
1..                                                                         	/users/tftp/	sdf.org	70
0awk.txt                                        2026-Apr-19 10:59     2.5 KB	/users/tftp/textfiles/awk.txt	sdf.org	70
(snip)
.

gemini's a little trickier if it's over tls, so trying to 
communicate over port 1965 will just get the connect rejected.
i've cribbed most of this from danq's post[1]

```
printf "gemini://gandalf/\r\n" | openssl s_client -ign_eof -connect gandalf:1965

CONNECTED(00000003)
---
(omitting lot of the tls handshake and certificate verbosity)
---
20 text/gemini
# bookmarks

this is a bookmarks landing page for lagrange.
(snip)
```

i don't have access to a spartan server (gemini without tls), but
it looks closer to gopher's request path (and what the 
underlying gemini request looks like)

```
printf "danq.me /posts/gemini-without-a-browser 0\r\n" | \
  curl telnet://danq.me:300
```

also learnt about nmap's own version of netcat called 
ncat[2][3][4] which does tls/ssl (but requires a copy of the 
certs if self signed).

additional reading (openssl is a handy tool for troubleshooting 
cert issues)[4]

[1]: https://danq.me/2023/11/08/gemini-without-a-browser/
[2]: https://nmap.org/ncat/guide/ncat-ssl.html
[3]: https://geekcabi.net/posts/using-ssl-connections-over-ncat/
[4]: https://tarnbarford.net/journal/securing-sockets-with-tls/
[5]: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/6-openssl-commands