Ok, so I lied...

I haven't been posting regularly after all. Also, it seems that my reason for bringing new life to a mostly dead attempt at a hobby has fallen through... (Actually, fell-through, some time ago even, but I digress....) Ultimatly, I have decided to keep running SBBS just for the heck of it. However, the purchase of a new PC for my mother on Black Friday -- that's the after-Thanksgiving-Day sale for you uninitiatd, I have decided to return to the Windows version of the software. Hopefully I shall find a new raison d'etre. (Please pardon my poor French typography; I'm using Windoze at the moment, so I don't know how to type accents correctly... I may or may not fix this once I'm back on my mac.)

Why I use a Mac

150435OTvs_w
Originally uploaded by huberjoshua.

Sure, I also own a Swiss Army knife, but its blades do not randomly eject at high speed or spontaneously induce anything with the word "death" in its name, as it is well-constructed; the is true of my Mac: it does its task, and it does it well. (I may not be able to run an alternate version of the OS and turn my computer into a PVR and home theater system, but then again, I don't want to.)

Addressing addresses

Ok, I should now have a correct telnet address in the sidebar. In case it has not shown up yet... Click ME! That (<--) address should be pointing to the correct IP address so long as the BBS itself is up and running, as the BBS package updates the IP to which it is pointing every so often and whenever it is restarted.

All your feeds are belong to us!

I have now added a section for the available site feeds to my sidebar. Actually, there is only one feed that need be available via Feedburner. This is due to the fact that the feed offered by Blogger is being repackaged via Feedburner into form useable by any RSS reader, past, present, or future.

It's alive! (And no longer brain dead)

It seems that a simple extraneous "%d" was responsible for the inability to unpack QWK packets. Its presence was causing the inclusion of "30000" in the unzip command line. Now the BBS should be up and running consistently. (It's true nature is yet to be determined though....)

Hm... The brain is still empty

It seems I have a problem; I cannot import network messages for DOVE-Net, the message network that comes pre-configured with every SBBS setup. I have made the necicary tweaks that are required for for Un*x systems, but I still am having great difficulty. Just in case someone who knows is reading, here are the errors:

The console output:

7/30 03:03:59 evnt QNET-FTP: Downloaded VERT.qwk successfully
7/30 03:03:59 evnt QNET-FTP: Done.
7/30 03:04:00 evnt Executing external: unzip -ojC /sbbs/data/VERT.qwk 30000 -d /sbbs/temp/event/
Archive: /sbbs/data/VERT.qwkcaution: filename not matched: 30000
7/30 03:04:00 evnt Node 1 !ERROR 2 in un_qwk.cpp line 76 executing "unzip -ojC /sbbs/data/VERT.qwk 30000 -d /sbbs/temp/event/" access=11
7/30 03:04:00 evnt /sbbs/data/VERT.qwk renamed to /sbbs/data/VERT.qwk.42eb2660.bad

The error log upon log-in as Sysop:

Error log:
Sat Jul 30 2005 03:00:06
Node 1: #0
source: un_qwk.cpp
line: 76 action: executing
object: unzip -ojC /sbbs/data/VERT.qwk 30000 -d /sbbs/temp/event/
access: 11 (0xB)
errno: 2 (No such file or directory)

Sat Jul 30 2005 03:04:00
Node 1: #0
source: un_qwk.cpp
line: 76
action: executing
object: unzip -ojC /sbbs/data/VERT.qwk 30000 -d /sbbs/temp/event/
access: 11 (0xB)
errno: 2 (No such file or directory)

It's alive!

Ok, so we all know of a certain Dr. Frankenstein who found himself in quite a bit of trouble after that one, but...
It, SBBS that is, works, sort of... I was forced to install ncurses as I mentioned in a previous post. This let me compile a functional set of executables; however, the menus on all of them look screwy. (I think this may be due to Ubuntu's choice of default encoding, but I have yet to verify that assumption.) I am also having much difficulty with a few remaining details. I am, however, going to make the BBS accessible on a limited basis. Feel free to log-on and create an account. iQLand. (It may be up; it may be down, but for sure, it'll stick around!)

Curses!

Ncurses actually. That seems to be wherein my problems lie. Apparently the curses/ncurses library that is included with Ubuntu is incompatible with SBBS, so I'm compiling ncurses-5.4 as we speak -- metaphorically of course. Hopefully, this will conclude my build-time difficulties.