Hi Maurice,

Sorry to not reply sooner.. things get hectic here some days ..

>> the trouble now is none of these systems have drives anymore
> Exactly why I said "Yeah right!" above.  I used to make backups of

haha.. yeah.. I don't know when I saw a floppy drive last on a system..
cd/dvd players now of course 

> floppy backups to 'regular' disks but the last time I did I realized
> that nothing on a floppy disk backup was of any consequence anymore and
> the scheme fell by the wayside.  Then of course I ditched the floppy
> drive once I had better ways to boot a system.  I seriously doubt that
> even if I had a floppy drive anything on the stinkin' floppies I was
> carting around everywhere were recoverable anymore.  They are at *LEAST*

Lol.. tell me about it.. well I have been successful in dragging ancient
code off of some 5.25" floppies but that was years ago.. who knows
today :)

> a dozen years old.  I even have a box of virgin floppies that never got
> used and I doubt they'd even be usuable given a working drive.

Someday all of our old hardware will become valuable "Vintage
Items" (tm) Lol I'm not counting on it though :)

[...]
> required) it turned out to be even smarter than I thought it was when
> I started using flash disks.  Now they are WAY bigger and vastly less
> expensive than when I started doing this I am extremely satisfied with
> myself for being light years ahead of the trend.  I believe I predicted
> back then, in a Linux echo post, that this would happen.  Nice to be
> right for a change.  :-)

That is cool :)

>> Ron is very sold on the gui interface of ubuntu

> Tsk, tsk.

I know.   I don't know WHERE he gets that from.. Not from MY side of the
relationship Lol

>> I guess it's because he designs software for it
> Ah!  Then he has an excuse.

Yeah haha.. and we do have to eat :)  can't make $$ goofing off eating
bon-bons all day like I do Lol

>> testgrab is just a dumb name I came up with

> I figured someone fiddled somewhere.  Works great.

>> It might be wise to note that users should issue a get grab
>> [packet-name] command (ie. get grab fb.qwk or something similar)

> I tried that by doing a telnet login and setting the offline to qwk.
> I couldn't get a grab to work and went back to the testgrab idea and it
> worked.  I am assuming that if I set it bluewave the it'll fail as well.
> Could be something I am doing wrong but only the ascii outputted grab
> seems to work.

When I ever tested it, the bluewave extension worked.. I think I tested it
at least.  I'll try it today if I have time.  I have multimail reader here
and that handles bluewave packets IIRC.  I'll let you know what I discover
. The basename of testgrab would be used.. then the extension
would determine whether the file was a .rep from you or what I guess.

>> put grab fb.rep command in order to upload their locally named
>> fb.rep file to the magic filename grab

> Okay but then I assume that the .rep needs to be in an acceptable format.
> The problem I see is this part in the downloaded testgrab's message I
> am responding to;

> fido.DADS message #8744 from Janis Kracht to Maurice Kinal.
> Reply to msg # 8743. (There are no more replies.)


> Note the "#8744" part.  How will I know as a user what # to put in?
> Offand I'd guess that in the .rep package it might be something like this;

> fido.DADS message from Maurice Kinal to Janis Kracht.
> Reply to msg # 8744.

> Note the difference.  I know what the message # of what I am replying
> to but not what # the actual reply I am currently typing will be until
> after the act of cutting and pasting it to your BBS.

Most people use Offline reader programs like Multi-Mail, etc. to read,
reply and create packets.. you could look at the source code for Multi-mail
if you want to roll your own :)   I think I found it on source-forge, or it
may have
it's own site..  ah just checking the file on my system... William McBrine
is the maintainer of the code still 


>> which BBBS needs to know the file is in fact an uploaded reply
>> packet

> Makes sense to me.  Now all I have to know is what information to put
> into the reply packet and the rest is a done deal.  I can replicate the
> structure of testgrab quite readily.

Yep... you'd have to outline each field in the message headers.  There are
some files in the pdnc file echo that probably looked at those readers eons
ag..

>> So it looks like any name will be ok doesn't it?  with .rep as
>> the extension to indicate a reply packet ...at least that's
>> what it looks like to me..

> Same here but I am betting there is a little more to it than
> that, especially in the case of ascii formatted offlining packets.
> The testgrab.zip is cased now the testgrab.rep, if indeed that name will
> work, requires some info as to what the header(s) should contain.

> Do you want me to test one and see using my above logic?  I'd hate to
> crash anything there without your prior knowledge and intervention.
> I doubt it would but just in case.

Go right ahead and try whatever you like.  I don't think it can hurt anything
.. if you're concerned about "where", you can post and
test, etc. in the
PDNECHO but it's not necessary and I agree it shouldn't hurt a thing 

Take care,
Janis

--- BBBS/LiI v4.01 Flag