BBS file hosting question
reddit / bbs

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Dobesov · 2018-02-22 15:57

I have a quick question for you guys. a few years back I had a littel
Synchronet BBS set up, mostly because I wanted to have fun with my old
ansi art skills and TheDraw, plus BBSs are just cool. The problem I
had with synchronet was that I wanted to tie it in with my fileserver,
but I found that (unless I am incorrect) you had to upload the files
to the BBS for them to show up, and it could not just look in a
directory and produce a file listing in downloads.

Is there a way around this or are one of the other modern telnet/ssh
systems able to do this?

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fivepointohshi- · 2018-02-22 18:54

That's a leftover from the old days when drives were very very slow,
and building an index off of disk would take an incredible amount of
time vs loading a database index.  I'm not personally aware of any
that will inspect a filesystem, but it would be really easy to do
using a tree structure, and a text file containing basic information
about the file like 'filename|title|description (or filename.dz)'.
Ex. files/doors/lord406.id containing information about
files/doors/lord406.zip

The problem you'd likely see would be that it would be very memory /
cpu intensive when you reached a large number of files in a directory
to parse, and it would increase exponentially when you have multiple
users accessing at the same time which makes a database a much nicer
option even now.

It'd be pretty simple to extend Photon BBS (or any BBS that provides
source code) to have that capability.

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Dobesov · 2018-02-22 20:09

Yeah, its one of those things you might only have to run once or on
demand when adding files from other sources, but darn if i don't want
to "upload" all my files back in to the same place they are already
in!

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Darnit_Bot · 2018-02-22 20:09

What a *darn* shame..
***
^^Darn ^^Counter: ^^460148

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RazorKitten · 2018-02-22 23:01

Not modern really but CNet (Amiga BBS Software) always had this
feature.

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bkuhl · 2018-02-23 04:34

For the record. I believe there were C64, C128 and Amiga native
versions of C-Net.

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electronicchicken · 2018-02-23 04:54

Synchronet has the [ADDFILES
utility](http://wiki.synchro.net/util:addfiles), which offers a bunch
of options for importing files.  If its import options don't entirely
meet your needs, some scripting could be done to build it out (as
somebody [did recently](https://github.com/fstltna/bbs_utils), though
I have not used these utilities and can't vouch for them).

Mystic and others may have better facilities for this stuff.
Synchronet's file-area stuff needs some refurbishing in general, but
it's usable.

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electronicchicken · 2018-02-23 04:58

To which I should also add that the "Transfer file path" that you
configure for a given file area (in SCFG, Synchronet's main config
utility) could point to the place where your files already live (for
your existing fileserver).  The addfiles utility could add them to
your BBS' file database without having to duplicate the files.  (Not
that I've tried this or can promise that it won't blow something up.)

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RazorKitten · 2018-02-24 01:08

Absolutely! I just don't know for sure if those versions also had the
feature in question.