Re: WWIV how I miss thee
  By: Darrick Burch to Thom Miller on Sat Apr 10 2010 02:02 pm

 > How well has this technique been working for you so far?  I had some success
 > configuring a BBS in this manner, but I never tested it that much.  What
 > happens then the user disconnects prematurely?  Are you able gracefully brin
 > down the dosemu session?

So far it's been working out pretty well.  On a Pentium D 3.00 GHz top says
dosemu with the bbs is creating a 10-15% cpu load when active.  Partially this
is because it's running in 'full' emulation mode because Tradewars 2002 and
T.A.G. both seem to demand it.  I'm giving each virtual machine 16 MB of
memory, so the memory footprint is minimal.  Since I'm only running 4 nodes,
this seems to work pretty well.

T.A.G. is set up to use a mailer, so a user logs off the bbs software exits for
the frontend mailer.  At this point, I'm able to exit out of the emu and mark
the node as ready to recieve another 'caller'.  If someone prematurely
disconnects, T.A.G. is timing out after a few minutes, dropping out for the
mailer, and I'm able to gracefully exit the emu.  I've done a limited amount of
testing with all four nodes active, and it seems to be having no issues.  Of
course, I haven't advertised the board anywhere yet, so it remains to be seen
how well it works outside of the limited testing performed so far.  I have high
hopes, though.

Another nice thing about this setup is that I gave the board/dos it's own hard
drive, but have it mounted under linux.  This means I can use cron and the
greater flexibility of linux scripting to move stuff between the bbs
environment and the greater 'internet' world.

Thom m.
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