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Advice On A New-School Old-School BBS
An anonymous reader asks I am thinking about setting up a local "community" network over WiFi minus internet connection. In other words, I would like to run a small server isolated from the web as an experiment in small scale networks (e.g., serving a café-heavy one-block radius.)
I have plenty of clever ideas -- discussion/gripe boards, weird artistic projects -- anything to bring back the old-school BBS memories where online users were drawn from a single geographic location. But everything I've learned so far is how to act as a small node on someone else's network. How can I make my own -- and make it wireless?
Google doesn't pull much up that I can find: it is mostly targeted towards those building a (free or profit) Internet access point." (Read on for more.)
" Does anybody have sources of information for how to learn about setting up the network I have in mind? Basic tutorials and those covering more advanced issues such as security would be very helpful. Finally, is there anyone out there with real world experience? Beyond imparting technical help, do you have suggestions for implementation? What worked, and what didn't? Did the lack of internet access make the project unpopular? (And if you did provide internet access as a teaser, how did you handle liability and financial issues?)"
(This reminds me of the Community Memory Project; can anyone point to some modern equivalents?)
The tech side to this is relatively simple. What you're going to want to do is to basically create your own IP-based network that isn't the Internet... that means your WiFi should have a DHCP server that hands out 10.x.x.x (unroutable) addresses to anybody who wants to get one to get them on board...
.com, .net, .org and for that matter any "real" web request to a "Hello World!" webserver that explains that your WiFi link isn't offering a connection to the Internet, instead it's a one-of-a-kind location that's offering...
Once there, your DNS universe is gonna be a bit funny. You should map all
From there, you just assign your own server names to whatever have to offer, and serve it using standard Internet technologies for web content.
I think your problem is that you're not searching on the right term on Google. What you want to do is called an "intranet"... and it's really nothing more than setting up Internet-designed IP-based stuff and forgetting to add the link to the outside world.
Now, how you're gonna promote such a thing... well, that's up to you.
I don't quite think it will fly.
I has bbs at the time, when internet was quite expensive back home, and it was doing ok mainly because lack of option.
Today, www is hugee, you don't have to restrict to a single area, you aren't limited to, with things like slashdot, disney, news, streaming and p2p, you have highly specialized and good services for free *discreet cough* .
On the other hand, if it's strictly intranet, restricting outside access AT ALL, it might turn out as an interesting experiment. Do tell us how it will grow (if it grows at all).
You're gonna want to redirect all web requests to your BBS web page. The thing that people naturally do when they connect to a hot spot is to try to surf. If they get redirected, they'll see what your hot spot is for. You might also support various file sharing protocols with one visible machine. On that machine have one visible file that says README with instructions on how to surf to the BBS.
shoulda hit preview! here's the links in question:
wi-fi box - a true free replacement WRT54G firmware
how to get banned from using sveasoft's firmware
Of course if you wanted to be more old-school you could set up a public-access *NIX login, or even run an old-school BBS type deal via telnet. It would still be a good idea to route people to a website explaining how to get in. For that check out here and here, and here
here's some ideas and software to make it work.
First, for wireless connection management you can use the nocat wireless portal system (requires linux). That will allow you to advertise a wireless AP and have the users automatically redirected to your community site.
For the actual site, I recommend phpnuke,postnuke or any of the content management software. They have lots of features hat will allow old style bbs functions like forums, gallery, pictures, files, etc. There are also modules that will do more.
With nocat you have the option of adding an internet connection in the future. I suggest talking to a local cafe shop, they may already have an internet connection and may be interested in a project that attracts the surrounding community.
You need to be careful if you're not providing outside access. First, you will still need to protect users against infections (just for liability, even though you didn't infect them and they should've protected themselves). It's as likely an infected Windows node will come inside your LAN as one would have found your network had it been on the Internet. And a malicious user could easily enter your network and begin attacking hosts.
Preferably (if possible, this is theory), assign 10.n.x.2 addresses, with your router responding to 10.n.anything.1. Let n be constant for your network, but x be the number assigned to each user. Give a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0. Thus you cannot reach another node without asking the router, who will of course deny; if you're blocking outside access, it should refuse to serve anything to 10.n.x.2 but 10.n.x.1. (If the request is on port 80, of course, explain the lack of outside access.)
Second, when outside Internet access through wireless covers your area, you either need to (possibly negotiate with the provider to) provide access yourself, talk to the provider about making yourself just a node on his nettwork, or provide clear instructions on how to switch from your BBS to the other provider. (It should be just a matter of changing the channel.)
If you have $$ to spend on this, Worldgroup (aka The Major BBS) is still sold and supported by Galacticomm, Inc. (now owned by netVillage.com). Its more or less a one stop shop, including things like:
Local & Internet E-mail
Chat Rooms with shared White Boards
Shared File Libraries
Threaded Discussion Forums
Customizable Surveys
IRC Client
FTP, Telnet, Finger, POP3, SMTP, NNTP
WorldLink
Built-in Web Server
Huge library of add on software
If you don't have money to spend, try Synchronet. Features are simmilar, though not nearly as mature:
Local & Internet E-mail
Chat Rooms with shared White Boards
Shared File Libraries
Threaded Discussion Forums
Built in support for Fido, RIME and QWK!
IRC Client
FTP, Telnet, Finger, POP3, SMTP, NNTP
Built-in Web Server in development
Supports door games
Open Source!!!
Good luck!
Here's an idea -- set your system up as you normally would for acccessing the Internet, but simply setup your site such that posting and other interactive services are only accessable from within the local subnet.
That is, if you have a (for example) /. like website, limit posting only to those people with IPs in your local subnet (ie: 10.x.x.x). People in the outside world will be able to read the posts, but you need to be inside the wireless range in order to be able to post.
The big benifit of doing this is that frequent users will be able to keep up with discussions and such from home -- but if they want to contribute, they'll need to be within wireless range.
Yaz.
This software provides an "Active Portal" which basically means any web traffic is redirected from wherever it was supposed to go to some specified machine.
Its not a difficult thing to do manually either with iptables. (from memory its something like: iptables -T nat -I prerouting -P tcp -dport 80 -d ! localnet -j DNAT --dest localbox). Just make sure you have a DNS server running that sends all requests back to your IP or else their browser will give them an error.
From there, you just set up and run apache on 'localbox' and you're off!