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When Things Go Wrong

As the Internet grows ever more popular, its resources come under more of a strain. If you try to use gopher in the middle of the day, at least on the East Coast of the U.S., you'll sometimes notice that it takes a very long time for particular menus or database searches to come up. Sometimes, you'll even get a message that there are too many people connected to whichever service you're trying to use and so you can't get in. The only alternative is to either try again in 20 minutes or so, or wait until later in the day, when the load might be lower. When this happens in veronica, try one of the other veronica entries.

When you retrieve a file through gopher, you'll sometimes be asked if you want to store it under some ludicrously long name (there go our friends the system administrators again, using 128 characters just because Unix lets them). With certain MS-DOS communications programs, if that name is longer than one line, you won't be able to backspace all the way back to the first line if you want to give it a simpler name. Backspace as far as you can. Then, when you get ready to download it to your home computer, remember that the file name will be truncated on your end, because of MS-DOS's file-naming limitations. Worse, your computer might even reject the whole thing. What to do? Instead of saving it to your home directory, mail it to yourself. It should show up in your mail by the time you exit gopher. Then, use your mail command for saving it to your home directory -- at which point you can name it anything you want. Now you can download it.

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