Questions for SysOps: reddit / bbs ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr_William_H_Cosby · 2019-06-30 22:31 OK, so a couple of questions I've been accumulating in a text file over time and wondered if anyone could provide some insight. ​ 1. What's with the timeouts on modern BBSes? I am in the middle of a new message scan, and I get up to take a constitutional and I come back and I'm logged off. Why are timeouts so short? Is this habit or is there a reason for this, where nodes fill up quickly? Most of the net doesn't work this way and while I understand why in the past when you had phones lines you'd want to kick off idlers, most boards have like 8 nodes, one active (mine), and they're policing my idle time in a way which makes a lot of systems infuriating to use if I get distracted for even a moment. 2. What kind of troublemakers do you encounter, and what is the nature of the troublemaking? I am considering, like possibly maybe sorta, putting up a board, and I wondered what your experience was in terms of granting new users full access on their initial call, vs. validation, and I periodically will also see references to troublemakers being removed from systems. I'm curious what the nature of said troublemaking tends to be and how often you encounter it. This strikes me as a bizarre issue to encounter in 2019 but I know it happens. 3. Real names on Fidonet. I know this is a long standing policy, but is this actively policed? One of the things I don't want to do is ask a million personal questions to new users, and the one I have left - for Fidonet - is the real name question. Personally I don't care but it's Fidonet policy. I also have zero way to police this. Does anyone police this, and, if so, how? I wonder whether or not there's much point to carrying Fidonet at all given its bizarre political issues and personality conflicts. I also wonder whether the real names used on Fidonet are actually real names. 4. Is there any method by which Mystic can support Dovenet? I know Dovenet is a QWK-based and used by Synchronet, but I always wondered if it was limited to that software. (I am considering using Mystic.) 5. Revisiting troublemakers. I know that all common ports are routinely scanned on any net-facing server, but do you ever show evidence of human-based hacking attempts or vandalism, and, if so, how do you deal with it? 6. How frequently are your transfer systems used via a console connection (i.e., not via some FTP interface into them) using old protocols like zmodem or xmodem. I am wondering if these are worth the time, or if they are still actively used. 7. I was watching a Lunduke video about problems getting Doors working on Linux-hosted systems. My plan is to run Mystic on a Linux VPS -- is it true that Doors are a pain using emulation? 8. Are any other BBS networks a mess in terms of interpersonal tension and bad blood like Fidonet is? ​ Any insight would be appreciated. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- sonofagundam · 2019-07-01 02:38 "Constitutional" LOL!!! "Dr_William_H_Cosby". LOL!!! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- electronicchicken · 2019-07-01 05:55 > What's with the timeouts on modern BBSes? Some sysops are stuck in the past, others don't bother to tweak these settings, so they're left at stingy defaults. Many of these defaults are holdovers from days of constrained resources. I believe I've eliminated or maxed out timeouts on my system, because I really don't give a shit if someone wants to idle all day long the way I do. > What kind of troublemakers do you encounter, and what is the nature of the troublemaking? The occasional asshole stops by and sends me a shitty message or posts something stupid. This happens 1 - 5 times per year and is usually pretty fucking lame, so who cares. They're just embarrassing themselves most of the time. If someone posted a bunch of crap on networked message areas courtesy of your system, I guess that could be embarrassing, so some sysops may post warnings or require validation as a deterrent. Some sysops just have ye olden "YOU'RE A GUEST IN MY HOUSE" mindset and make up rules and post stern warnings just because they can. No set of warnings or validation schemes will ever suffice. Keep an eye on your system and if somebody abuses it or uses it as a launchpad for whatever, do what you can to boot them off. The reality is that there isn't much payoff for trolls in this space, and they move on fairly quickly. > Real names on Fidonet. Whether this is policed depends on the chain of coordinators above you. If somebody cared they could cut your feed in one or both directions. I ask for a "real-sounding" name because rules is rules and yet I don't actually care, so this seems like a good compromise. Fidonet is garbage anyway, so at the end of the day it doesn't fucking matter. Much could be said about the use of real names; why, why not, what's in a name. I feel like I could digress into a big thing about it, so I'll just step back for now. > Is there any method by which Mystic can support Dovenet? Yes. I don't know if QWK is readily possible, but some people get it via fido-compatible links instead. I'm not sure if DigitalMan feeds these or if it's someone else. Maybe ask about this on DOVE-Net from a connected system. > (I am considering using Mystic.) Why this over the other options? (No right or wrong answer, I'm just curious.) > Revisiting troublemakers. I know that all common ports are routinely scanned on any net-facing server, but do you ever show evidence of human-based hacking attempts or vandalism, and, if so, how do you deal with it? Unless it's causing me real problems (something hammering away at my system enough to lock it up or slow it down) I flat-out ignore it. Some sysops get their underpants twisted in knots over this, because they spend too much time looking at their logs and take it as a personal insult when someone tries to do them the hack. In reality it's just shitty scripts that have found themselves a telnet or SSH server and so they do what they're written to do. Usually these operate on the assumption they've found some crappy router or security camera. Even if they get past your login prompt, they aren't getting the shell they were written to expect, so the commands they send won't do much. At worst they tie up a node (and this is where timeouts may come in handy). There are different ways you can deal with this. "CAPTCHA"-esque things with a timeout so that your nodes don't get locked up. Having your services listen on nonstandard ports. Delve into that as it becomes necessary. The actual risk to you from this sort of thing isn't great. > How frequently are your transfer systems used via a console connection Couldn't say. I don't bother to host a file library. Occasionally a user writes to me, absolutely baffled as to "where are the files???" so I guess some people expect this and want it to be a thing. It's worth it if you are producing original content and want people to be able to download it, if you want to offer yet another facet of the classic experience, if you host special-interest files or really want to be another mirror for stuff that may disappear from other sites someday. If you're serving the files from your BBS via FTP or HTTP, supporting x/y/zmodem isn't a huge extra step, so you might as well. I don't do none of that and I'm perfectly happy. > My plan is to run Mystic on a Linux VPS -- is it true that Doors are a pain using emulation? I haven't bothered with it in years, but I didn't have much trouble getting dosemu going. It did take up a fair bit of time, though, and in the end it was extremely slow and ended up having been a waste of effort. This was emulation on top of virtualization and was a recipe for poor performance. Not sure if things have improved in this area but I wouldn't count on it. If you're not too concerned about hosting local-only games / running your own, you can keep your VPS and just use a game service like DoorParty or BBSLink instead. There are arguments for and against this approach, but we can save that for later discussion. > Are any other BBS networks a mess in terms of interpersonal tension and bad blood like Fidonet is? DOVE-Net and FSXNet are both pretty good and generally friendly. Fidonet is mostly people using fidonet to argue about fidonet. There are a lot of small networks which I suspect have very low traffic or contain the exact same users who are already in the abovementioned three. IIRC nelgin of endofthelinebbs.com connected his system to just about every network he could find. You could probably spend some time on his system reviewing traffic on various networks and then decide from there which ones you want to connect to your system. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Galileo228 · 2019-07-01 06:14 Good of you take the time and provide detailed answers to all of these questions. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2019-07-02 03:11 Saw some great answers so I'll just chime in on a couple of points: 2. Trouble makers - you can limit access to outnets in all modern BBS software, so only approve people that aren't nuts. Frankly the chances of someone calling into a public BBS is very very low (even the awesome ones), much less someone who will cause trouble. 7. Doors are a huge pain to run under Linux, you need a Windows XP vm to really even bother. That said you can check out github for a handful of doors that can be compiled under Linux. Dosemu is great if you're on a x86\_64 system, so you can probably run a handful more under that. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2019-07-02 03:21 Follow up to 2: Keep in mind maybe 10 people a month will be connecting if you're a well publicized public BBS. Make sure to offer secure signup (SSL via a web client) and connection (SSH) options, nobody uses raw telnet anymore.