8.6  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.