09 Dec 16 20:46, you wrote to me:

 PH>>> Thanks Mark!
 PH>>> Appreciate your help :)

 ml>> you're welcome...

 PH> That's the thing I really like about our wider community we're all
 PH> fundamentally helpful guys that have (I think) a similar desire to
 PH> tinker and assist - so again, thanks my good man :)

yup... as long as politics, religion, or money are involved, we do all seem
to get along pretty well :lol:

 PH>>> Paul's / Michael's suggestions) but I am holding on to this file!
 PH>>> It's like gold dust around these parts!

 ml>> i originally wrote to ask paulQ to send you a copy of his and then i
 ml>> remembered that i should have one on my FMail/TimEd point which i did
 ml>> so heck, i just sent it over rather than you having to dance the
 ml>> dance you were fixing to get started in... feel free to share it
 ml>> where ever it is needed... it is only 400 null characters... if you
 ml>> weren't on winwhatever, we could have been over and done in a minute
 ml>> with dd ;)

 PH> Well I have been moving in the direction of Linux stuff for quite some
 PH> time now, and although I am still running a lot of stuff on windows I
 PH> do have my low power fm radio station powered by an Ubuntu box. I also
 PH> set up the Usenet NNTP server using Debian, and the latest additions
 PH> to the home are raspbian powered Raspberry Pi's :)

slowly but surely you are leaving the nest and joining the ranks of the
truly free ones :lol:

 PH> So perhaps in time I could be considered to have come across from the
 PH> dark side!

nah... i can't call it the dark side... there's so much more light around
and it is easier to see what's going on, really...


FWIW: the way to create that file with dd?

  dd if=/dev/zero of=lastread.bbs count=1 bs=400

this creates a file one block in size with a block size of 400 bytes...
we're reading from /dev/zero which outputs null characters... we only need
null characters at this point because the first user, generally the sysop,
has read no messages in any of the HMB areas... technically speaking,
lastread.bbs is made of X number of blocks of 200 records... these records
are one word in size... a word is an unsigned 16bit integer... its maximum
value is 65535 which is (2^16)-1 (two to the 16th power minus one)... in
hex that's $FFFF in pascal notation or 0xFFFF in C notation...

how does lastread.bbs work? well, we start it off with one block of records
for the first user record in the users.bbs file... as noted above, this
block has the internal structure of 200 records, one record for each HMB
area... space for all 200 possible areas is always allocated... so for just
the first user, there's one 400 byte file... add a second user and the file
is now 2 x 200 records (2 x 400 bytes)... add a third user and you have
three user records of 200 words each which is 1200 bytes total...
previously i showed my HMB files and my lastread.bbs was 422400 bytes in
size... dividing that by 400 gives me 1056 user records which coorsponds to
the actual number of user accounts on my BBS... yes, this file is
relationally linked to the users.bbs file... the relationship is based on
the users.bbs record numbers... the physical record number, not one stored
in the file like some BBSes do... enough of that, though...

NOTE: if you need a file of some size, dd is the way to go... while testing
the above, i tried one without the "count" and had to CTRL-C out
of it... this was only a couple of seconds and it had already created a
file that was some 4Meg in size... you can also create a file with random
data in it by reading from /dev/urandom... as its name indicates, it is
purely random bytes... someone might suggest to use /dev/random but it will
eventually block (stop outputting data) unless your system is busy...
random data is generated by system activity...

)\/(ark

Always Mount a Scratch Monkey
Do you manage your own servers? If you are not running an IDS/IPS yer doin'
it wrong...
... All you can really do is pop a Valium.
---