Hey Janis!

> Darn, wish I had some of my old back up disks around

Yeah right!

> well, those floppies probably ARE in the closet someplace..
> the trouble now is none of these systems have drives anymore

Exactly why I said "Yeah right!" above.  I used to make backups
of 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* 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.

I started using compact flash disks for important backups ages ago before I
even had a working usb machine going.  That turned out to be a smarter idea
and now that usb can boot like a regular drive (no floppy emulation
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.  :-)

> Ron is very sold on the gui interface of ubuntu

Tsk, tsk.

> I guess it's because he designs software for it

Ah!  Then he has an excuse.

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

Life is good,
Maurice

--- BBBS/LiI v4.01 Flag