Setting Up a BBS from Scratch, Help needed

[AbsoluteVoid]

I plan to host a BBS on a LAN connected to about 20(ish) clients, as part of a technical fest that will be held in my college for people to engage in it and explore the precursor to the internet. I wasn't part of the culture that grew up on BBSs, and frankly I myself learned more about just few months back and have no idea how to set up one properly, that being said I'm well versed in programming and know a fair bit of Linux.

I hope you guys can point me to a good guide on this subject (or better make one for the forum for others to use), suggestions, problems I might run into or even just a simple guide for me to take of from.

EDIT: what kind of system hardware would I need to run the BBS smoothly?

[Goalkeeper]

I think that you and @FaunCB will be great friends.

He knows this stuff.

[MichaelLindman]

I think that you and @FaunCB will be great friends.

He knows this stuff.

He sure does:

My BBS

LeveledBBS.soon.it via telnet and SSH (and RLogin apparently, whatever that is) Any other questions, message me. There are 25 lines available. If theres EVER a user login problem via log in nodes, I will be surprised. New Door Games: LORD, LORD2, PLANETS: TEOS, and TradeWars. Trade wars is connected separately via port 2002. It is unregistered so there is only 1 player slot. If there was ever going to be donations, it would be a registered TradeWars Account (no preassure). LV1 BBS Post So I have been looking into BBS’ and making one for the community to play with. Whether it would be named Level1BBS or L1BBS is still in planning, but, I am mostly plotting out how I am going to use this. I have quite a few things that I would like this thing to do for me. For one, I want a place I can stow away notes and such things while I am out and about. I know this seems a little ridiculous but to know how I work on research papers and such os a little ridiculous as well. In fact I’m just writing thi on a windows 2000 machine in abiword. But, as a place I can pop open a terminal and throw a note onto and pull down later, a BBS might work really well for that. Another thing I want it to do is give a place for us to talk about old shit and have some community collabs on some really old shit, the BBS itself being a spearhead for that all to start in. There isn’t a real place to talk about vintage computers and old systems on this forum, nor (honestly) is this the place to talk about such things. While it would be great, still not the place. So if labeled LV1 or not, it is still an extension of the forum, I think, until it gets used as something else. Lastly its a large experiment to see how much of this sort of stuff I can hook into each other. Maybe network some BBS together if I can, maybe integrate some of my own code into the system, but that is all to come. It will be in flux if you intend to be a user :3 So, I have also been looking at what syste…

Community Code: BBS Games / BBS Community Involvement

I don't think I could get anyone else to make a post, but at the moment I am assembling my BBS. The other night I played TIS-100, fell in love, and thought "Was there a door game like this?". As coding was kinda popular among the nerds of the time I woulda thought someone had combined the two. Apparently not! So my idea here is anyone who wants to be involved in the BBS that I am hosting can come up with ideas and throw them here! Then whoever wants to pick it up can and we can all work on an idea to make it a reality. I think this would be cool to do, personally. My Idea Is a game similar to TIS-100 or something as such in which you have to do an instruction that is listed out, code it around obstacles, and have it work! Someone mentioned on another thread that users could even create challenges and leave them for others to solve, then after solving, a user could leave a message about the coding problem (I added the last part in). It would be easy to manage as you don't have to download anything, and all you have to do is log in. If you have a challenge you are writing then you can save it to the FTP server or maybe we could have the game read from the FTP folder and people could upload challenges as they wrote them out, though we would have to create a format and that might be a bit too much :P. If anyone wants to expand on this, feel free. The BBS will be up in some form tonight as I am working on it now. If you have other BBS ideas you want to see, eventual feedback on the projects here, and other whatnot, feel free to let me know. The current BBS is based on Synchronet, if that helps anyone.

(Potential Project) Level1Techs BBS

I'm bored, the internet is stupid, fuck you guys I'm going to the BBS! Thats right, for the last few.... probably years actually, I have wanted to host a BBS. Not many people use BBS' any more, the only one that is still major is fidonet, but you know what I want to build one. What is a BBS you ask? [image] [image] Basically a forum but command line. So...... why? Am I insane? yeah probably. But I want to set one up because to learn a lot of the new server stuff I go all the way back and go up from there. I don't want to learn the new stuff first, nono thats a waste of time if you don't know the base! In my opinion. Anyone interested? Edit It will be running off of synchronet. I'm not sure if I would actually label it as Level1 Techs after thinking about it because I could be that one wierd ass streamer who has a BBS instead of a forum >:DDDDD But yeah, thinking on the name thing. I'll post it in a lot of places so its more than just us on there. If theres any doorgames you used to like let me know what they are! I'm looking for some doorgames that are like Hack, some coder games, and text adventures which shouldn't be too hard. I'm working out hardware next then building. edit, but with a poll What should the BBS run on? Linux Windows 2000 Windows XP 0voters Show results

[FaunCB]

H-huh bweh? mumbles back to sleep

I'll post later I just woke up

[FaunCB]

Right, so playing with old shit. First theres a lot of reference sites that you can go to in order to learn about BBS'. I used like 3 but I'm too lazy to look them up. I used this one at the start because it looked like windows XP and made me happy.

http://www.bbscorner.com/startabbs/

Because I'm a shitlord.

They have a few references to BBS systems, but in my opinion you should use synchronet. It allows you to open a terminal and watch your clients, even type in their boxes to freak them out (kek), lots of expandability, tonnes you can do with it. You need at least 1.8 GHZ and 2GB ram. If you have a pentium M laptop laying around with a gigabit ethernet port you could use that. Core count doesn't matter as much for this as its old old software. I WOULD however run it on its own hardware. I don't know if someone could get in through synchronet to your machine but I would do it anyways. It runs on win 98 and up and on linux, but the windows one is handy because it has a nice UI.

Everything else you need is on the synchronet site, the site I posted, or sites that my site leads to.

Good luck sysop.

[FaunCB]

Also I have a back up of my bbs. Its down until further notice as I haven't had time to really maintain it. If you would like to have mine open to connect to just pm me deets.

[AbsoluteVoid]

Thanks a lot, will PM you if required.

[NetBandit]

It's not a real BBS unless it's limited to 1 (or maybe 2) callers at a time and 33.6Kbps max speed.

One of the most challenging aspects of the BBS days were being able to get your daily time (and download) quota filled when you were competing for connection time with other BBS users. I'd spend hours dialing the same BBS over and over just to get a busy signal. But when I finally got through - wow what a feeling.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that there won't be much of a sense of appreciation of the BBS days unless you can convey the limited availability aspect - something that doesn't carry over well to modern times of multi-megabit and nearly unlimited simultaneous connections.