Station Log for September 08, 2026 -- 07:16:36 PM MDT The new NPS services is live. In addition to the mailbag being directly writable for visitor posts, there are a few other fun, possibly even useful services; display the menu like so: $ echo help |nc nex.runbsd.io 1915 # list of services Note: some commands can take arguments, i.e. '--help' -- Station Log for September 02, 2026 -- 05:46:09 AM MDT Been working on an expanded "NPS services" script which will be similar to some custom finger daemons, i.e. a menu of commands, some that can take additional arguments such as dictionary word lookups. Also adding a guestbook option for visitor comments. -- Station Log for August 15, 2026 -- 04:49:17 PM MDT The Nex client table -- under about/ -- has been updated to better reflect client capabilites along with test status for the anoNex Kornshell rewrite. A more comprehensive client section featuring reviews and links is planned. -- Station Log for August 10, 2026 -- 06:49:00 PM MDT Apologies to those receiving numerous "not found." errors; seems the dreaded trailing carriage return struck again.. It often goes unnoticed unless client testing includes curl or lynx; ncat and lagrange don't seem to care and likely strip the '\r' off before sending the request. -- Station Log for August 08, 2026 -- 02:17:20 PM MDT As of today the station is running the forementioned anoNex rewrite, replacing AWK with Kornshell as scripting language. Nothing unexpected showed itself during testing but reports from visitors would be appreciated. Will likely add some photos and other non-text files soon to take advantage of the new features. -- Station Log for August 07, 2026 -- 08:56:42 AM MDT After noticing that some stations are serving non-text files such as images it was decided to rewrite anoNex (again), this time in Kornshell. The new version will also feature virtual indexing, i.e. allowing any text file to be parsed as an index file so that any rocket links contained are activated by the client. The only caveat is said rocket link paths must be absolute since the forwarding index is not a real directory. -- Station Log for July 31, 2026 -- 07:58:56 AM MDT Gopher access (standard port 70) should be up and running now. System upgraded to 11.0(!); hopefully that's not a typo. -- Station Log for July 29, 2026 -- 06:57:03 PM MDT Been taking it easy due to a tweaked back. At least the heat has abated a bit. May launch a Gopher hole soon as an adjunct and possibly more familiar means of browsing the Nex station. -- Station Log for July 23, 2026 -- 11:17:09 PM MDT Now running NetBSD 11_RC7 ; thought for sure 11 would already be released but apparently things keep popping up so.. 7 it is. -- Station Log for July 18, 2026 -- 04:52:26 PM MDT Apparently the WiFi bridge needed a reboot. It's a repurposed TP-Link router running Ddrt that has actually been quite stable so I didn't initial consider it when the networking got janky. Seems okay now. -- Station Log for July 17, 2026 -- 04:31:07 PM MDT Some "station friends" have been added under about/. These are mostly for testing the use of personal Nex spaces on a multiuser Unix system. Seems to work okay and if crontab is allowed users can generate pages that periodically update, i.e. fortune files. -- Station Log for July 16, 2026 -- 05:19:49 PM MDT Seems the nps_client.sh script had some flaws (the stationmaster has spent too much time away from shell scripts in favor of AWK). Those flaws have been addressed and it should work properly now. -- Station Log for July 15, 2026 -- 07:44:26 AM MDT Decided the station logs could be consolidated into a single file given most entries are fairly short missives and it makes reviewing easier for those doing one-off Nex files retrievals. Could always do annual archiving so the logs don't get too unwieldy. -- Station Log for July 12, 2026 -- 12:10:00 PM MDT Finally got around to upgrading the system to the latest NetBSD release canadate (RC6) which should turn into 11.0 in a week or so. No major issues so far. -- Station Log for July 08, 2026 -- 01:59:48 PM MDT As part of testing the feasibility of implementing a multi-user Nex environment a serious flaw in the use of fingerd(8) was discovered which ultimately led to nixing the use of fingerd altogether; anoNex is now, like NexMsg, pure AWK managed by inetd(8). Very little was actually changed in the AWK script so no client issues are expected but please send a message if any are experienced. -- Station Log for July 06, 2026 -- 03:14:22 PM MDT Did a bit of rearranging to shorten some of the pages which seemed a bit longish for no good reason. Also per request, the mailbag is now its own thing at the top level. For now received mail will continue to be reviewed prior to appearing in the mailbag. Still convalescing from a nasty mountain bike crash a week ago. Hope to be back in the saddle by next week. -- Station Log for July 03, 2026 -- 07:12:31 AM MDT Still quite smokey but the heat seems to have thankfully moved east. Had a nasty fall several days ago while mountain biking; dropped the front wheel off the top of a berm I've ridden 100+ times and slammed hard into the upward sloping trail. The trail seemed a bit erroded from recent rains so perhaps that played some roll. Fortunately nothing broken, just a lot of soreness and some minor scrapes. Definitely feel the hits more now that I'm older. Regarding this station, I'm thinking of just powering it down as I don't feel like there's anything specific I want to do with it and given visitor traffic is quite low it's kind of a waste of electrons. Ultimately on the whole I'm feel a bit bored with computers and the Internet and would rather spend more time out in the woods before they all burn. Will think a few days more on it. -- Station Log for June 25, 2026 -- 08:31:42 AM MDT Those thunderstorms actually materialized; lots of lightening and rain but thankfully no giant hailstones. The trees and plants look happier. We did power down the various devices overnight to avoid surge damage. Everything should be working again. The wind-driven rain exposed the dry rot on the garage door bottom seal; off to the big box for a replancement. -- Station Log for June 24, 2026 -- 04:36:01 PM MDT Not terribly hot here but there is more and more smoke in the air which seems to be sapping our energy levels. Afternoon thunderstorms are forecasted for the next few days and we're hoping they'll clean up the air at least for a bit. -- Station Log for June 19, 2026 -- 05:07:48 PM MDT Still pondering potential uses for this station. While it'd be easy enough to simply copy/mirror content from elsewhere, the preference is for something fresh and at least moderately interesting. In the interim, here's some techno-retro naval-gazing.. Been experimenting with various git interfaces, WWW and Gopher mostly. The cgit cgi package runs quite well under NetBSD's naitve (bozo)httpd but hosting a public-facing web server is sort of unappealing. Simulating at least some of that on Gopher via Gophernicus is easy enough and could serve double duty as a Nex proxy. Implementing via Nex is interesting and can be done similar to the current ../status page which gets refreshed periodically. -- Station Log for June 13, 2026 -- 03:52:04 PM MDT Several folks have pointed out that this station's NPS incorrectly flags messages as "malformed" when feeding text to nc/ncat via stdin, i.e. when using the "official" NPS client like so: $ T=`mktemp` && $EDITOR $T && echo "." >>$T && nc nex.runbsd.io 1915 <$T Also, as a certain individual repeatedly stressed, using fingerd(8) for something like NPS is totally superfluous, possibly even ungodly. Can't comment on the latter but after much testing the conclusion is, not only is using fingerd here unneccessary it really mucks up cleanly reading from stdin. So no more finger-mediated NPS, just pure AWK f*ck*ry. Using telnet(1) as a client still doesn't work well but nc(1) should work fine so consider the NPS "New & Improved!" and keep them letters coming; we read every one of them. -- Station Log for June 10, 2026 -- 06:36:45 PM MDT The power was indeed off a full 10 hours. Apparently it was a massive effort to replace old wood power poles which this area has / had many. Every since the Superior fire a few years back there has been greater concern over high winds downing poles along the western edge of the metro area which often butts up to dry grassy openspace. Anyway, powers back and hopefully will stay on for the foreseeable future. -- Station Log for June 08, 2026 -- 10:38:21 AM MDT Actually got a few comments via nexmsg (NPS) over the weekend which was really great. Might just switch things over so it mimics the "classifieds" on Nightfall.city; probably most people like getting the immediate feedback of seeing their post appear remotely. Still thinking about what this station should be about. Really not keen on hosting yet another retro-techno naval-gazing digital shrine. If it does find a purpose, smaller more energy-efficient hardware will likely host it. Addendum -- 07:25:51 PM According to the power company the juice will be turned off for up to 10 hours starting at 8:00 MDT on Wednesday for "system updates". They have done this at least once a year for several years now so perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised. At least there hasn't been a Public Safety Shutoff for wildfire prevention since Fall; they give you very little notice for those. -- Station Log for June 06, 2026 -- 01:12:06 PM MDT The future arrive early - there is now a NexMsg postal service running on port 1915. Works similar to the NightFall.city NPS service except the FIRST word can optionally be set to an email address, a good idea if a reply is desired. See the => nexmsg/ page for usage details and examples. -- Station Log for June 05, 2026 -- 08:11:39 AM MDT Moved the client testing info into its own file under about/ as the current setup appears to work well enough and doing so cleans up the landing page. That said, I'd still like to hear about any client issues which can be send via the '=> contact' Gopher link. -- Station Log for June 04, 2026 -- 08:58:18 PM MDT Thought it might be nice to start a Nex Station Log (slog?) as a way to track this Nex adventure and perhaps solicit feedback from travelers that somehow find this place. Nex doesn't support any sort of query but since this is really a Finger server masquerading as Nex it may be possible to tweak things to allow commenting; a future project. For now, messages can be conveyed via a Gopher query: gopher://rawtext.club/1/~woog/contact .