[Phreaker Meekrab]

IM A PHREAKER AND I DONT EVEN HAVE MY OWN BBS!

Help me make one? because websites cant be wardialed.

:)

[clueless]

heh...

if you are running windows, you can get WWIV v. 5.0
its very easy to set up.. and you can get a wwiv telnet server for it. this will let you give out its address to people that dont have regular modems, and you wont have to give out your ph# to everyone in the world.

I dont know how much you know about BBS's... you could check out the BBS documentry, and even TWATech radio ep #235

I will again reccomend WWIV BBS software, if you are not a windows user, I believe there is a linux build for it, but I might be wrong. You can look for answers on usenet. - alt.bbs , and there is an alt.bbs.wwiv, or alt.wwiv.bbs one or the other.

If you dont have a newsserver with your ISP you can get to them via google groups.

you'll probabbly want to get a good txt editor (notepad++ will work nicely) for customizing the look of the bbs, and "thedraw" for creating ANIS welcome screens and such.


then decide what kind of content you want. most BBS's had loads of txt files, and a few txt based games.. good popular ones were "legend of teh Red Dragon", and "TradeWars", though there are a number of fun games. I even had a WWIV 50 IRC client running a little while ago the program was called "MANNIX" iirc, where instead of playing a game, it would take you to the IRC chan of the sysops choice.

[Phreaker Meekrab]

4 Things

I Want An Oldschool Wardialable Number.

Something That Can Be Run By Something OLDER Than I Am.

Something That Runs At A Good Baud Rate.

Something Payphoneable.

:)

This post has been edited by Phreaker Meekrab: 15 June 2007 - 02:24 PM

[clueless]

Phreaker Meekrab, on Jun 15 2007, 02:23 PM, said:

4 Things

I Want An Oldschool Wardialable Number.

all you need is a land line and a modem (1 for each caller ie: with 1 modem you can have 1 person and you (the sysop) on teh bbs at one time


Something That Can Be Run By Something OLDER Than I Am.

if you are not interested in running telnet... (and i dont know how old you are.. if you are 13 for example you'd be looking for something like 200mhz or less, i was running 4.54 on a 33mhz iirc, so wwiv 5 could quite possibley fit the bill)

Something That Runs At A Good Baud Rate.

as long as you have a decent 56k modem on your side


Something Payphoneable.

huh? I guess if you had a portable acoustic coupler, or spliced into the payphone wireing, otherwise you'd just call and get a carrier

:)

edit - check this link - its got all the technical info you should need to get it running... http://wwiv.bbs.us/

This post has been edited by clueless: 15 June 2007 - 03:00 PM

[Phreaker Meekrab]

Im 15 :)
So Im Gonna Run An Old School 486, A Terminal I Can Access From A COCOT.

:) Yay For Following In The F00fsteps of my phreaky forefathers!

This post has been edited by Phreaker Meekrab: 15 June 2007 - 03:34 PM

[notyourtim]

I think the fact that you want to run this on hardware that is older than yourself makes this a cool project.

I'm not sure how old is old in this case. 90's PCs often came with internal modems on add-in cards or (later) integrated onto the motherboard. Finding an old copy of MS-DOS might be tough these days. Perhaps FreeDOS http://www.freedos.org would work? Then you could download some old PC BBS software to run on it.

For 80's PCs (including Apple, Commodore, and all the other brands) you'll probably need an external modem. Finding the hardware and software would probably be more of a challenge, but I'd say the coolness factor would be higher. Hamfests http://www.arrl.org/hamfests.html might be a good place to look for cables and components.

Good luck!

[livinded]

I hope you have a job, you're going to need a phone line to dedicate to this/

[Beave]

notyourtim, on Jun 15 2007, 04:39 PM, said:

I think the fact that you want to run this on hardware that is older than yourself makes this a cool project.

I'm not sure how old is old in this case. 90's PCs often came with internal modems on add-in cards or (later) integrated onto the motherboard. Finding an old copy of MS-DOS might be tough these days. Perhaps FreeDOS http://www.freedos.org would work? Then you could download some old PC BBS software to run on it.

For 80's PCs (including Apple, Commodore, and all the other brands) you'll probably need an external modem. Finding the hardware and software would probably be more of a challenge, but I'd say the coolness factor would be higher. Hamfests http://www.arrl.org/hamfests.html might be a good place to look for cables and components.

Good luck!

If e-mailed off here, I can probably find a copy of MSDOS 6.22 :)

BBS are fun to run! Don't expect to get flooded with connections, but it can still be fun to run. Also, you'll want to _not_ keep whatever BBS software you use in its "stock" setup. People see that, and they'll leave. Your BBS needs to have personality - just keep that in mind. The BBS I run uses old Unix based software known as EBBS. I've taken the code, modified it over the years, and added features that I wanted. I'm not doing any ANSI stuff - I want to keep it truly "old school". The BBS was setup as a "off the beaten path" posting ground. Since you can only telnet/ssh to it, and up till recently dial into it, it drives a lot of the wankers away that I probably wouldn't want there anyways.

A note about dialup systems. Old systems (486, etc) used old UART (like the 8250). If you plan on hooking up a modem and plan to use over 9600 baud, you'll need to update this. It's pretty easy, just find a old serial board with 16550 UARTs. I can't imagine it'd cost more than a couple of bucks! If you plan connecting to the PSTN, you'll probably get turned off pretty soon when you realize very few people dial in. Plus POTS lines aren't cheap.

There's also MoIP, but that's gonna be slow - but cheaper.

Anyways, just a few thoughts. Oh - gotta plug my BBS... telnet/ssh bbs.telephreak.org :)

[Phreaker Meekrab]

Items I have at my disposal.

Waffle 1.65
Conexant HCF V.90/56K PCI Data Modem Card
Computers, Alot Of Them.
A Hookup In My Bedroom
Shaw Digital Phone (Way Better Than Voip)


www.bbs-mindphreak.uni.cc

[livinded]

I have a shrink wrapped copy of dos 6.22, but I don't want to really open it.

[Phreaker Meekrab]

put it in a boxframe.

i got my own DOS copy, and a copy of old school windowes 3.1.

[NoHandle]

Just got mine up & running using sychronet.

<plug> telnet bbs.bastion.org.uk </plug> Max of 5 nodes

It's sort of in 'beta' atm but you can exchange messages. It'll be up between 0900 and 2200 GMT to begin with so feel free to explore. If there's the demand for it, I'll leave it up permanently.

[baby-Hackribs]

This is pretty sweet, I have wanted to setup a BBS for some time now. /me inspired

[systems_glitch]

I've been thinking of constructing a dedicated BBS system...I've been toying with a little BBS app over the last few months, written for Linux with ncurses. I was planning on building a small parallel port driven switchbox, that would automatically switch our incoming POTS line from the punch block that connects all the telephones to it, directly to the incoming modem on the BBS machine. That way, I could have it automatically switch the line over for dedicated use, but have it switch off when everyone else would need to use the telephone.

I was going to edit my inittab to have Linux spawn an instance of my BBS software on a serial login, rather than getty.

This post has been edited by systems_glitch: 26 June 2007 - 05:28 PM

[notyourtim]

Beave, on Jun 15 2007, 04:58 PM, said:

Oh - gotta plug my BBS... telnet/ssh bbs.telephreak.org :)

Phreaker Meekrab, on Jun 15 2007, 05:17 PM, said:

www.bbs-mindphreak.uni.cc

Hey, telnet BBS's are cool, too! I just tried both your boards but couldn't get on. Are they down? I want to visit!

NoHandle, on Jun 26 2007, 02:44 PM, said:

<plug> telnet bbs.bastion.org.uk </plug> Max of 5 nodes

It's sort of in 'beta' atm but you can exchange messages. It'll be up between 0900 and 2200 GMT to begin with so feel free to explore. If there's the demand for it, I'll leave it up permanently.

I couldn't get on yours but then I realized I was out of the time range. I'll have to wait for the planet to turn a bit...

Are you guys on the Telnet BBS list?

[jfalcon]

Ah but the real question:

Are any of them going to network (ie: run FidoNet/Seadog/Opus)?

I've been getting back into playing with BBS's. Mostly because I want to get a package together (maybe a VMWare Virtual Appliance) that can do more than what craigslist already does. I hate the forum style they use on CL and the fact that it's so shitty without some sort of external interface (nntp or something) makes me yearn for the days when local social networks were BBS based.

Thusly, I'm pouring over Synchronet (www.synchro.net) which has a really decent web interface (http://vert.synchro.net) and is open source. Just wish other BBS people kept up with the times and did the same *cough*renegade/telegard/searchlight*cough*.

What would be cool is networking them together... and if the message base format can be modified into a sql database, it would make a killer add for BinRev.

[Beave]

notyourtim, on Jul 10 2007, 07:32 PM, said:

Beave, on Jun 15 2007, 04:58 PM, said:

Oh - gotta plug my BBS... telnet/ssh bbs.telephreak.org :)

Phreaker Meekrab, on Jun 15 2007, 05:17 PM, said:

www.bbs-mindphreak.uni.cc

Hey, telnet BBS's are cool, too! I just tried both your boards but couldn't get on. Are they down? I want to visit!

Yep. It sure was. We move around a lot of stuff over the last 5 days or so. The BBS is back up, and you should be able to get back on. It's telnet and SSH enabled.

[elisanford]

clueless, on Jun 15 2007, 03:53 PM, said:

edit - check this link - its got all the technical info you should need to get it running... http://wwiv.bbs.us/

thanks its good to get some attention thats my site & if anyone needs more help ill be happy to get some bbses setup & networked just email elisanford@gmail.com

& shameless plug
Skulls & Crossbones - telnet://skulls.sytes.net


Eli =-)~

[notyourtim]

Wikipedia's WWIV entry says WWIV was popular with hacker and pirate boards back in the day. Was this true? Why did they prefer it?

[Abhayaa]

Wow. That just made me feel very very old.

And yes, it's true -- although there really were only maybe a handful of options available, including WWIV. Remember, this was NOT the age of the internet, or for that matter anything uh speedy. Software was harder to find, and took a LOT longer to download (slow modems, remember)? Processor speeds were a lot slower, disk drives were slower and smaller (if you go back far enough, even nonexistent -- there's the story of the floppy-driven BBS, for instance), and so the size of the software that ran your board mattered -- and WWIV was reasonably sized... Incidentally, the security in WWIV was kinda a joke (even back then).

/ab

This post has been edited by Abhayaa: 23 July 2007 - 08:00 PM