RPi BBS?

[Omega-TI]

IS THERE A RASPBERRY PI BBS SYSTEM?

I've been thinking that a nice little hardware project would be to have a Raspberry Pi BBS system. Since my router is on 24/7, the Raspberry Pi would be a perfect solution. It's self-contained, has all the connections, enough memory, takes little power, small, etc.

 

I just don't know if there is BBS software available for it. Anyone know?

[doctorclu]

I admire your quest and I will keep my ear to the ground on this. So far I haven't heard anything.

[doctorclu]

I've posted this message on a few Facebook BBS groups. Maybe we'll hear something back.

 

Here is what I got from the BBS IRC:

 

<DrClu> Question, is there a BBS program for the Raspberry Pi?
<echicken> Synchronet
<echicken> ask art about it
<echicken> he loves to talk about running sync on the pi

 

So Art is the Sysop of the Fatcats BBS:

 

http://classic.fatcatsbbs.com/about.ssjs

Edited May 9, 2014 by doctorclu

[Omega-TI]

I've posted this message on a few Facebook BBS groups. Maybe we'll hear something back.

 

Thanks! I appreciate that. I think it would be nice to have a little BBS running for family, friends and of course classic computer users. Too many old computers sit around and do nothing most of the time. Since almost any classic computer can get on the internet with a little box plugged into it's com port (RS-232), it it'll help give these old computers some exercise.

[doctorclu]

Agreed.

 

I've been told there is a IRC group for the Synchronet BBS software. Synchronet is one of the currently supported BBS programs out there, and they are always trying to do crazy techie stuff.

 

Here is the IRC group (which has people logged in but not active) at master.bbs-scene.org/#synchronet

 

Here is something I just got back from the Facebook group:

 

Vincent Macaluso I've been running x84 on my raspberry pi. Haven't really done much customizing, but it's a cool lightweight system that is unlike any other software I've messed with. My hack-foo isn't really that strong, but if you know python it seems very flexible. You can see it in action at telnet: loathing.the-bbs.com (port 6023) - if you call in check out the nifty message areas... plus it supports about any term size and full UTF-8

59 mins · Edited · Like

Sampsa Laine Hmmmm...Sounds like a challenge that Pyffle could answer, if I can get the backend DB to be something like NoSQL and work reliably with more than one user - had some corruption issues in the past (for those interested I'm using Python + SQLAlchemy so basically any DB will do - I personally use Postgres as I find it the most robust)

[doctorclu]

telnet: loathing.the-bbs.com (port 6023)

 

Here is the login screen that tells where the BBS source can be found. Best results I found to see this opening screen was a 80x60 resolution.

 

The Main menu.

 

Make sure you go into settings and set to this for the best results, or at least that is what worked for me and SyncTerm.

 

Online ANSI Tetris anyone?

 

Here is what I (Greg) found out on how the message base works:

 

Greg writing to sysop of BBS Vincent Macaluso: I was able to get the best result using cp437 as the character encoding. Played a good game of online Tetris, and I checked out hte message base. The one problem I am having is how to navigate the message base. I can read the first message, how to get to the second message? I can see the following messages listed at the top, and normally the arrow keys would navigate that, but I can't seem to get to them.

A few minutes later Greg writes again...

Ah ok, once in the message area the first thing I can do is navigate using the arrow keys. Once I select a message, I have to hit "Back" or "<" to be able to use the arrow keys again. Got it.

 

When it is time to leave the system, hit "g", and though it not one of the final options listed, hitting "g" again will let you exit the system completely.

 

Cute little system. I like how we have a Raspberry Pi BBS in action, and I will add this to my regular call list going forward.

Edited May 9, 2014 by doctorclu

[doctorclu]

One comment I got after posting the above BBS program was:

"Mercyful> ya x/84 bbs #1984 on efnet.. it's python bbs, i think mystic will also work on pi.. i don't have one one myself so i haven't tried anything."

[doctorclu]

Leslie Given 11:25am May 9
Mystic bbs has a raspberry Pi version on sourceforge

[Famicoman]

I've actually been working at this more or less for a few months. Have not tried x84 but it looks promising.

 

If you want to run door games, you're going to have a bad time. I've been researching and testing the various emulation packages and haven't got anything that isn't incredibly slow due to the software emulation. I've tried dosemu with dosbox, and qemu and basically nothing will get you what you want. I talked to a guy who made more progress than me and he said the only thing he got working properly was to have a native x86 linux box with accounts setup to launch each door game that he could tunnel into from the pi hosting the BBS package. At this point, you'd probably be better off with a low-power Intel Atom box running Linux or Windows anyway.

 

If you want a nice BBS package without games, check out synchro. It runs, and works perfectly as far as I can tell, If you can't get telnet or other services to listen on any ports, run synchro when you're sudo'd or under root to get everything working properly.

 

The Rpi Mystic build will compile and build properly on the Pi and even let you go into the gui to change configs, but the daemons will not launch. Some users say you can use alternative daemons for telnet but nobody really seems to want to talk about where to get them or how to configure them. I also could not get the standard Linux source to compile or build under the Pi, the RPi package gets you the closest.

 

Alternatively, you could use something like qemu to emulate a whole DOS system and run any DOS-based BBS software within that virtual machine. This might get to be slow though.

 

I'd be interested in how the performance differences between the RPi and other low-power SOCs like the Cubieboard or Bana-Pi compare as these little boards might make better candidates.

Edited May 26, 2014 by Famicoman

[hellbeard]

Hello Atari people!

 

Although mainly an Amiga guy I used to have an Atari Falcon once upon a time.

 

Concerning x/84..

 

Check out bloodisland.ph4.se (port 23 for telnet or 1940 for ssh) to see a fully configured x/84 system in action. The development of x/84 has been in a very active phase during the last 5-6 months and lately there has been daily updates. We are 6 people involved in the software right now. There's still no filebase and the message system is going to get be reworked a bit but it's a very capable modern system as it is now, 100% configurable and open source. If you have any questions you can ask me here or drop by in #1984 on efnet.

[gozar]

My first BBS was a Linux box in '94 or '95. I went an entirely different route. Lynx was the main program ran when a person connected. For messages I had a local innd installation and used tin. Pine was used for private messaging.

 

I forget how I created users though. Worked pretty well, and was very distinct for the time. Nowadays I'd add an irc server. :-)

 

All of this on a 386dx-40 and 4 megs (I think) of ram. Recompiling the kernel really helped speed.

[Android8675]

Hello Atari people!

 

Although mainly an Amiga guy I used to have an Atari Falcon once upon a time.

 

Concerning x/84..

 

Check out bloodisland.ph4.se (port 23 for telnet or 1940 for ssh) to see a fully configured x/84 system in action. The development of x/84 has been in a very active phase during the last 5-6 months and lately there has been daily updates. We are 6 people involved in the software right now. There's still no filebase and the message system is going to get be reworked a bit but it's a very capable modern system as it is now, 100% configurable and open source. If you have any questions you can ask me here or drop by in #1984 on efnet.

 

Just wanted to say I went onto Blood Island the other day using Syncterm... Amazing BBS. Custom fonts UTF8 encoding (though I couldn't get that to work under SyncTerm, may try something else in the near future), beautiful ansi. very clean looking system.

[Plastik]

 

Has anyone come across a good telnet client for bbs'n on the raspberry pi? Syncterm I couldn't find for Rpi and I tried using Xterm but it does display bbs's correctly.