Hello Wes!

May 30 10:32 03, Wes Garland wrote to All:

-- mgetty issue --

 WG> The important thing is that the getty/calling program has to 
 WG> pass
 WG> off a device filename (which is NOT the controlling terminal) to 
 WG> Maximus,
 WG> and I need to modify max_args.c to support this (Scott changes 
 WG> everything  
 WG> over to ints as quickly as possible, where 0=COM1: -- I reused the 
 WG> ints  
 WG> to mean port numbers in the tcp/ip driver)

Oh, so you'll make a fake device file, maximus is communicating with mgetty over? 

We need to find a way, to solve the mailer problem, because most of the
people who will run maximus at linux, would also be a fidonode.

 WG>  - Starting from a mailer -- I don't see any point to this in tcp/ip 
 WG> mode. Again, the mailer can't pass around the socket as stdin/stdout 
 WG> for
 WG> the reasons mentioned above. 

I think Roy ment from a POTS mailer like Binkleyterm whitch is running
under Linux too, and it doesn't use getty/mgetty afaik.

 WG>  - There's one more start mode which I intend to implement -- opening 
 WG> a
 WG> tcp/ip connection, raw or telnet, to a terminal concentrator which 
 WG> has an
 WG> attached modem bank. I have seen code for these which run local 
 WG> daemon to
 WG> provide a pty for each modem, but I've always found those to be more
 WG> trouble than they're worth. Yes, I have the facilities to test this. 
 WG> :)  

Hmm, that's sound smart.

 WG> Bob:
 WG>  - There is no way in h-e-double-hockey-sticks that I can see that
 WG> Maximus will support non-vt100 terminals in inbound caller mode. 
 WG> OTOH, if
 WG> we can securely run "max -k", we could make use of the
fact that the
 WG> "local" video is implemented with curses. I'm sure I'm
not the only 
 WG> one
 WG> who wants to log in from a Zenith Z19. ;)

Did you fix the 'one-charecter-backwards' problem with max -k?

 WG>  - Good call on the dupe checking! I seem to recall something about a
 WG> 2-second granularity as well, which was giving me grief gating usenet
 WG> messages back in late '92. Looks like we'll have to update the dupe
 WG> checking in Squish, but I agree with Bob on the timing -- not until 
 WG> we
 WG> have a stable product should we try adding features! :)

I don't have a clue about fixing it.

 WG>  - I had a quick chat with Scott. According to him, he doesn't think 
 WG> he
 WG> changed the msgapi binary format or API from version 1.02 to 3.02; he
 WG> said the primary changes (that he could recall) were 
 WG> performance-related.

There is nothing about the structure it's fine enought. But there is a
problem about how many bytes it should read everytime it reads from a .sqd
file.

There is some problems about reading the xmsg structure, maybe the problem
is only at unix ..

I guess you misunderstood me.

 WG> If anybody has any better serial implementation ideas, I'm all ears. 
 WG> Or,
 WG> for that matter, if you know how to control a modem with DCD set low,
 WG> preferably in a portable fashion :), that would solve the problem. I 
 WG> must
 WG> admit, I haven't tried to work around that issue since I first bumped
 WG> into it under BSDI 2.1 and Solaris 2.5.1 in .. 1997. Haven't needed 
 WG> to 
 WG> 'till now.

My requirement is only, that mailer call should be aviable too.

 WG> Bo:
 WG>  - Bob's right about chat; we don't need any fancy UNIX-style IPC for 
 WG> the
 WG> chat rooms to work; IIRC they work through IPC%02x.bbs which should 
 WG> work
 WG> just fine under UNIX. We may need to take a look at the locking 
 WG> semantics
 WG> in my sopen() to get that working properly (or the DosSem* functions 
 WG> in  
 WG> unix/dossem.c, depending on how Scott implemented the CB-style 
 WG> chats).  

Ok, that's good too me... BTW i just said the only advantage about using a
deamon for listening at a tcp port is you could do IPC.

 WG> Bo:
 WG>  - Project goals -- inetd has huge problems as discussed above. 
 WG> Serial 
 WG> via some sort of a getty or mailer handoff should be doable; native
 WG> serial DEFINATELY is. As for a telnet-only BBS -- I think that would 
 WG> be    
 WG> stupid. :)

I guess people allways avoid talking about: 

    H o w  S h o u l d  M y  S y s t e m  B e  A b l e  T o  T a k e  
    P O T S  M a i l e r  C a l l s ?

.. then maximus is answering the call?

 WG> I also have no intention of adding ftp/gopher/http/finger
 WG> into Maximus, if people want to use that stuff, they should use the
 WG> internet. A BBS should be a BBS, dammit. Doors *out* to the internet 
 WG> are
 WG> fine, but making a BBS look like a mini-internet always struck me as
 WG> being totally counter-productive. :)

That's good enought to me.

 WG> All:
 WG>  - Scott sent me the wordprocessed version of the Maximus docs, so we 
 WG> should be able to update them for use under UNIX.

Ok

Regards,
Bo

--- Msged/LNX 6.1.2