Hello Rowan_Crowe!

Thursday October 02 1997 12:40, Rowan_Crowe wrote to Tony Frank:

 RC> Hmmm...lucky you. I managed to blow up a 486dx40 motherboard a little
 RC> while ago, and had to replace it with a 386dx40. The
"downgrade" doesn't
 RC> bother me (with FreeBSD, more RAM is generally better than more raw CPU
 RC> power :) ), but I had put aside the 386dx40 m/b for a new project I'm
 RC> working on.
 RC> Time to watch VIC_TRADING I guess. :)

:-)  Or offer to take some 'old' computer hardware off the hands of someone
who has just upgraded their system to a pentium etc...

 RC> Fair enough. I was in a similar situation, I got my 2nd line installed at
 RC> half price when there was a special on... after that I had a pseudo full
 RC> time link, a dialup account that didn't need to be disconnected when I
 RC> went to bed. ;)

Hehehe...   Well, lets see.  So far 2 user calls this week, not counting a
guy from uni who I transfered some uni related files to.

Since my FE game started getting runtime errors at the end of last week, I
use the BBS machine to check maybe 4/5 mail areas.  This one, The Battlenet
Arrowbridge 2 echo (since I'm coordinating that game) and the Net632/Region
50 sysop areas...  Maybe one or two others if I really dont want to look at
my uni work.

As such, it's kind of looking like there's no longer any point in running a
system.   I can get those echos via the internet (if I had a semi regular
link happening) and since today my Battlenet hub polls have been getting a
"this number is disconnected" message this morning, and I have
just read Carla's announcement that she's shutting up shop too...

The BBS scene seems to have either died over the last 1.5 - 2 years, or
it's taken off in some other direction which I never heard about.

  Looks like I'll have another spare machine sooner than I expected.

 TF>> I presume this is for 14.4k/28.8k dialup?
 RC> Yup. http://www.telstra.net/

 RC> ISDN is the same per meg price, although install costs a little more (as
 RC> does the hardware and line rental at your end).

Hmm...  had a job interview this morning... actually, looking at the time
it was yesterday morning.  So if that goes well I might be able to start
thinking a bit more about a permament link... hehehe

 RC> You can see how often mine crashes. The last one it did all by itself, I
 RC> have a prog that beeps on reboot and tells me to press a key within 10
 RC> seconds if it was me that rebooted it due to it locking up. Otherwise,
 RC> it's logged as automatic.

Mmmmm...   I havn't bothered with anything automated since I got it tweaked.. :-)

DESQview has been running for 5 days 9 hours 12 minutes and 4.28 seconds
Since Sun Sep 28 14:33:07 1997

Which was the power failure.

Actually I have been restarting it about once a week to do a full defrag on
the HDD's...  They get fragmented pretty quickly, especially the interbbs
games drive & the messagebase drive...

 RC> I'm not entirely sure, but from memory ifmail is integrated. I don't know
 RC> if you can use just the mailer part and/or interface it with something
 RC> else via FTP.

Something to think about then...   Perhaps a new project for myself... 
Write a Fidonet Technology Compatible mailer in Java....  hehehe...   I
havn't yet tried to do serial comms with Java, I'll have to look into that.
 The TCP/IP side of things is *SO* simple it would have TCP/IP based
connectivity long before anything through the serial port. :-)

 RC> ppp (user level ppp, as opposed to pppd) can do dial on demand. You could
 RC> probably also knock up some sort of script to kick up pppd if a packet
 RC> arrives to be routed to the outside world.

 RC> If you have a couple of workstations or more then it's probably worth
 RC> setting up a HTTP/FTP cache like Squid, plus named to cache DNS queries.

Yeah...  Which is why I've recently ordered the 2.2.? CD set from Walnut
Creek. :-)  (Knew I could get it back on topic given long enough)

Unfortunately the lecturer at uni has a bad timetable when compared with
mine - he is free Monday/Tues/Wed to help me do the install there &
then (I bring in my pc and install everything there) however Mon/Tues/Wed I
have lectures almost solid! :-(

As such, I've ordered it, and when it comes I'll have a go by myself and
pay him a visit when I want to leech his freebsd archive... :-)

Regards,

        Tony

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