• Set up a new BBS, saying hello

    From Andrew Brook@VERT/TYCHOSTN to All on Wed Feb 9 14:40:50 2022
    Hi All,

    I just set up a new BBS, for the first time in over 30 years because one does feel nostalgic at times, doesn't one? :-)

    Eventually, time permitting, customizations will happen, it's pretty standard fare right now and I have just two users (including myself!! No great surprises there, I suppose)... What's running here? Well, email, doors (TWGS, GW and BRE are all registered and legit, not like back in the day, I suppose better late than never, eh?)

    My old BBS was running CNet on an Amiga 500 with a 52mb hard drive, that was luxury once upon a time! Cost me almost $600 for the drive alone, although the SCSI card card it came with also gave me an extra meg of RAM which doubled my memory... The whole thing was running on a 1200 baud modem... Fast forward to today and I've got this system running on two Ubuntu 20.04 VPS instances in a datacenter in Milan, one runs the BBS, the other handles inbound and outbound mail (relays both ways to the BBS - not for any reason other than I could and I know postfix better than I know synchronet for now)... The mail server also runs TWGS in Wine which is listening for rlogins via a Wireguard VPN connection to the BBS server... I believe in complicating my life, apparently. :-)

    Anyway, in case anyone feels like dropping in, there's really not much to see right now other than me flying around my Tradewars game by myself, the address is bbs.tychostation.it / web terminal can be found at www.tychostation.it

    Greetings from sunny Genova, Italy!
    -Andrew

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    þ Synchronet þ Tycho Station BBS - loosely, although hardly, based on the Expanse
  • From Xerxes@VERT/KN6Q to Andrew Brook on Wed Feb 9 15:18:01 2022
    Re: Set up a new BBS, saying hello
    By: Andrew Brook to All on Wed Feb 09 2022 02:40 pm

    My old BBS was running CNet on an Amiga 500 with a 52mb hard drive, that was luxury once upon a time! Cost me almost $600 for the drive alone, although the SCSI card card it came with also gave me an extra meg of RAM which doubled my memory... The whole thing was running on a 1200 baud modem...

    Hi!

    I first started BBSing on an Amiga 500 w/ 1200 baud modem and I loved that box.


    Welcome!

    73,

    Tom

    ________________________________________________________________
    Sysop of Desert Rats Sanctuary --- https://bbs.kn6q.org

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    þ Synchronet þ Desert Rats Sanctuary --- https://bbs.kn6q.org
  • From Mewcenary@VERT/EXTRICAT to Andrew Brook on Wed Feb 9 21:58:31 2022
    Re: Set up a new BBS, saying hello
    By: Andrew Brook to All on Wed Feb 09 2022 02:40 pm

    My old BBS was running CNet on an Amiga 500 with a 52mb hard drive, that was luxury once upon a time! Cost me almost $600 for
    the drive alone, although the SCSI card card it came with also gave me an extra meg of RAM which doubled my memory... The
    whole thing was running on a 1200 baud modem... Fast forward to today and I've got this system running on two Ubuntu 20.04 VPS
    instances in a datacenter in Milan, one runs the BBS, the other handles inbound and outbound mail (relays both ways to the BBS
    - not for any reason other than I could and I know postfix better than I know synchronet for now)... The mail server also runs
    TWGS in Wine which is listening for rlogins via a Wireguard VPN connection to the BBS server... I believe in complicating my
    life, apparently. :-)

    Sounds a familiar tale.

    I had an Amiga 1200, ultimately with a 520 Mb HD (I think). It ultimately ended up in a 'Power Tower' as well, if you remember those! I never had the opportunity to run a BBS much myself (other than Dabbling with Falcon). I always looked enviously at Xenolink. What's CNet like?

    I mostly ran as a point off a BBS, using MailManager. Nice bit of software. MultiMail has taken some getting used to in comparison, that's for sure.

    My career is in the cloud now, but enjoying running my own SynchroNet instance at home using an Intel NUC and Proxmox.

    Anyway, in case anyone feels like dropping in, there's really not much to see right now other than me flying around my
    Tradewars game by myself, the address is bbs.tychostation.it / web terminal can be found at www.tychostation.it

    I took a look - very nice! Loving the Expanse theme as well.

    Mewcenary.

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    þ Synchronet þ Extricate BBS
  • From Andrew Brook@VERT/TYCHOSTN to Mewcenary on Thu Feb 10 09:23:58 2022
    Re: Set up a new BBS, saying hello
    By: Mewcenary to Andrew Brook on Wed Feb 09 2022 21:58:31

    I had an Amiga 1200, ultimately with a 520 Mb HD (I think). It ultimately ended up in a 'Power Tower' as well, if you remember those! I never had the opportunity to run a BBS much myself (other than Dabbling with Falcon). I always looked enviously at Xenolink. What's CNet like?

    I eventually upgraded to an A2000 (which I got off a friend secondhand for a few hundred bucks) which had almost 12mb of RAM and 100mb of hard drive space, so I gutted my A500, transferred all the ram chips (there were so many to transfer! all 64k chips) and hard drive into the 2000 and ended up with a computer that lasted me well into the 90s... I think it finally died around 97 or 98 which was fine, at that point it was a bit difficult to use it online anyway, my ISP was getting rid of shell accounts and I was using a program called multi-link to get a fake slip connection via the remote terminal... They hated me for it because apparently the companion app on their server was chewing up a lot of cpu cycles... hehe oh well, thems were the days.

    CNet was actually a really nice BBS to use, better than Paragon for the Amiga, it had a huge amount of options and everything was quite logical. The only thing that was irritating to say the least was a file called bbstext which contained all the text output (obviously not in any order that made much sense) for the board. It was annoying to edit and if you made an error you could potentially wreck your entire board... Other than that, it was outstanding. It's too bad, really, that they never open sourced it to port it to other systems, I can't imagine they're making a lot of money off it these days, even if it is still commercially available for the Amiga... It was a consideration (was going to run UAE on one of the servers and host it in a Workbench session because, why not?) but there just seemed to be far too many things that could go wrong with that... :-)
    ---[ Andrew Brook ]----------------------------------------------------------- ---[ Tycho Station BBS ]-[ An Expanse Themed BBS, very poorly executed ]------ ---[ Telnet: bbs.tychostation.it ]-[ Web Site: https://www.tychostatio.it ]---

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    þ Synchronet þ Tycho Station BBS - loosely, although hardly, based on the Expanse
  • From Zip@VERT/SCBBS to Andrew Brook on Thu Feb 10 16:02:00 2022
    Hello Andrew!

    On 09 Feb 2022, Andrew Brook said the following...
    I just set up a new BBS, for the first time in over 30 years because one d feel nostalgic at times, doesn't one? :-)

    Indeed! :-D

    Well done, and welcome!

    Greetings from sunny Genova, Italy!

    ...and greetings back to you from a sunny but slightly cold Sweden. =)

    Best regards
    Zip

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 2022/02/03 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: Star Collision BBS, Uppsala, Sweden
  • From Mewcenary@VERT/EXTRICAT to Andrew Brook on Thu Feb 10 15:45:12 2022
    Re: RE: set up a new BBS, saying hello
    By: Andrew Brook to Mewcenary on Thu Feb 10 2022 09:23 am

    commercially available for the Amiga... It was a consideration (was going to run UAE on one of the servers and host it in a
    Workbench session because, why not?) but there just seemed to be far too many things that could go wrong with that... :-) ---[

    I'm mulling over doing that to get MailManager up and running, and use it to run as a point off my BBS....

    Mewcenary.

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    þ Synchronet þ Extricate BBS