Slashdot Mirror
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?)
I've thought of this myself for my own city. I'm not ready to take on such a project, but in the event that i change my mind, these would be the first issues i would adress:
1) who is paying for equiptment?
2) where is the equiptment going to be located?
3) how many people are acutally interested (is it going to be a wasted effort)?
4) servers to host content
5) Mesures to prevent people from causing problems (dhcp servers, hackers, viri and such)
6) will DNS be used?
7) Scale of network vs ammount of information being communicated
#7 is most important because if you have alot of people using this system as though it were a LAN, general broadcasts will be flooding your entire network. you will need *real routers* to segment parts of the network.
*real routers* means they're not intended for home use (ie: Linksys, d-link, etc...)
#4,5,6 & 7 all assume this network is large - predict this! its less work later if this really takes off for ya.
oh, and Seattle wireless has a network like this so you'll want to take a peak there to see how they have things set up.
You are confusing me with someone who cares.
If you want 80s old school, you could do something akin to the WELL. I had something similar in my old building complex (one computer on my floor where people would just post crap for everyone else to see) but it turned into a sort of an internal craigslist. That's not a bad thing, though, and the landlord bought it from me for one month's rent. In the new building I wired up a half-dozen neighbors on my network, installed ICQ, and showed them how to post to a tiny news server I had setup. They're more keen on surfing the web, though, so I just limit their bandwidth to 1 mbps. As for a BBS, well, that was a little before my time, but not so much before that I don't remember feeling ripped off after waiting an hour to download what I thought would be hot pr0n. Turned out to be a girl in a bikini. In a bikini fercrissakes!
I also reply below your current threshold.
I mean seriously - the only people using them anymore are for nostalgia.
I remember back in the day, I had four modem lines in my parents' basement churning over my 10base2 Lantastic setup with a variety of 286 and 386 boxes. I could get 80-120 calls a day - everything from file leechers to door game players to people who liked to write perverted endless stories.
It all ended about 1995 or so - some eked out for a few more years, but the thrust of the community turned to the Internet long before that.
I don't see the point. Set up a web board or something, that's about as close as you can get. If you feel completely compelled, you might want to investigate Citadel. I note some halfway decent Citadel ports to a telnet based system.
Of course it's just like old Citadel, ie, crappy like wwiv, but most of the good BBS systems got bought by commercial vendors and then summarily dropped into the bit bucket when it didn't turn out to be profitable in the late 90's - pretty much what happened to Wildcat, Searchlight, Pc-board, proboard, etc etc etc.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
I used to run a BBS too. I assume you must be outside North America, since I heard in Europe (and in a lot of other places) you have to actually pay for every minute online (long distance or not). In Canada and USA, as long as it's a local call, you don't have to pay per minute and only pay the basic charges. That meant people could call anywhere and stay online as long as they wanted as long as it was regional. I guess we were lucky (and are still!). ;)
Ahhh.... those good old times.
I still play BRE and Trade Wars regularly from http://www.gargoyleslanding.com/ though.
If you're interested in running a truly oldschool BBS, check out Synchronet. Free, good telnet BBS server.
And if you don't run LORD, you should be shot.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
I've thought of a setup kinda like this in the context of a college campus. As the school starts to take more control of their network, I've thought about a system which would use some kind of ad-hoc intranet (although I don't know much about ad-hoc networks) which wouldn't rely at all on the school's infrastructure. Even for simple activities like chat, I think it'd be cool (and harder to identify who's who.) Just an idea that came to me after spending some time on FreeNet at school...
But while it is not strictly connected to the internet, there is nothing stopping an individual connecting a rooftop access point to a router and then to a home DSL connection. You then create a VPN to the internet via community mesh. This allows you to log on to your own home DSL connection from any location that can access the wifi mesh.
In Australia there is a country-wide IP assignment mechanism to eventually get continent-wide community wifi.
It's good practice, and future-proofind against the day when his network might get an internet link of some sort (think: time to download and deploy patches and updates on his intranet servers).
I want a new world. I think this one is broken.
You should map all .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...
.something domain (maybe the name of your city?) that isn't a normal TLD. This would help to distinguish your network from the Internet.
The interesting thing to do would be to setup a local
It would also scale if the network is ever connected to the Internet, and external intenet users could even access the sites by changing their DNS settings.. perhaps even extending to local ISPs picking up this network and offering it as a local service, only when you're connected through them.
Speak before you think
Is it feasible to run a Linux box as an access point, and run Snort on it for portscan and worm alerts? I don't know about the details of promiscuous mode on wireless cards, but that seems like the most efficient solution to the first problem you mentioned.
Karma: Segmentation fault (tried to dereference a null post)
Why don't you forget all the technology and just do a Java based chat room that looks like a BBS. You can host it on a server and people access it via a wireless internet connection. Just give out login and passwords to only local people. Other than not dialing in with a modem you'd never be able to tell the difference. The only thing that makes your network unique is that it is geographically constrained. If you can't manage to screen users based on geography find another way, such as having them pick up a login written on a piece of paper at a central place.
Granted, the whole idea seems oddly backwards. If you want a bigger local community of tech users why not just start a club, or any number of other ways to meet a certain type of people. It doesn't really seem to be about the BBS.
Ten years ago I ran a BBS with a friend, and it was fairly successful. A lot of it had to do with the fact that we had a lot of content that wasn't around elsewhere. One problem I forsee is soembody mirroring in real time to the web, then you won't have that unique content anymore. I mean you'll still have it, but it won't be unique.
So first off, you have to assume that anything you have will leak off to the larger network. That doesn't mean that all is lost, you just have to make sure that your content is compelling enough to grab people and make them connect up, post, and participate.
I would suggest a MUD as a possible hook to grab people. They're fun, they're community based by nature, and they're addictive. Or something like TradeWars 2002, etc... Back in the BBS days people would log in all the time to play the games, and then once they were on they'd also post messages, exchange files, and communicate.
I would also suggest having informal get-togethers every once in a while. In Ithaca, NY we used to have "geekfests" every month where you could meet and greet people from the BBS community, people would bring their computers and game or show off their latest programming projects, etc... That really anchored the community aspect. Lately Fark has been doing something similar, having parties for FARK users in various cities, and then the photos and some highlights get posted back to the main site. While I don't participate extensively in FARK, it seems like that is building some sense of real community there.
In essence, if you have enough content to hook people, and you facilitate the initial socialization period, you can build a community that will endure.
---
Play Six Pack Man. I
Just set up a proxy server that routes all traffic to the BBS website.
meh
The second thing I thought of was that the BBS served a community. Therefore, you service might be about publicizing events and opportunities in and around the area. If the audience is the coffee house crowd, then think of what they would want to know about. I suspect the one thing that will doom the service, as it tends to doom any service, is to have personal inflexible agenda.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Without a doubt, nothing brings people together like a Citadel system. Since it's focused on people and not file leeching, you get a stronger sense of community.
What's more, modern Citadel systems give you telnet and web-based access, so the old-skool BBS'ers can have their 80x24 fun while the newbies can partake of the community from the comfort of their favorite browser. The e-mail system is built-in, sporting SMTP/POP/IMAP, and you get an instant messenger and a chat system completely integrated. It's a totally self-contained package that gives you the community-oriented site you're looking for.
If you want to see one in action, just click on the BBS link in my signature. I've been doing this for 16 years and loving it. BBS's are not dead, by any means.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Basically, what they are doing is getting coffee shops to pay a small fee to host the access points (running a custom Linux configuration), networking those, and offering both the internet connection on the coffee house's dime and building out their own BBS-like intranet service.
Maybe the idea would be harder to get off the ground in other parts of the world, but if you can swing it, I think internet access is a big draw for people who otherwise may not bother.
Imagine a college-wide wireless network, not accesible from the outside - and thus not browseable form the outside for anything being shared.
Allow email only to pass in and out, and you have yourself a killer community network that doesn't eat up all external bandwidth. Set up a few webcams and otehr cool things and people will happily switch to "the other internet" often.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Ham Radio enthusiasts have been enjoying wireless "BBS's" for a while now in the form of packet radio. Packet radio is essentially a DTMF modem that hooks up to your ham radio, allowing you to transmit data packets usually around 9600 bps, sometimes 19200. Due to the limited range of wireless transmission, these packet radio BBS's are for the geographically local. They have message boards, BBS email, etc etc just like the old days of the internet. Some even have internet gateways so you can send real e-mail etc. Its really cool technology, but whats applicable is the ideas behind it. See if you can find out what kind of BBS options packet radio enthusiasts have, and what kind of local-oriented things they can do with their network.
Hi, I used to participate in dialup BBS's back on my C=64 years ago. I really loved them (their design, colorful menus, file transfer sections, message boards, online games (god I miss Empire), voting booths, etc), however evolution took place -- the Internet was born. BBS's had their limits (most were run off of single phone lines), so one user at a time could dial up.
;)
... it's yet another extension of the Internet and right now wireless is hot topic and cheap to build.
..... ;) anybody remember "The Draw" ?
BBS's were a means of communication back in the day when there was nothing else. It gave people a way to express their interests with other people who maybe had the same interest (see Internet). Some of the bigger BBS's used to even be networked so they could share message boards (i.e., WWIV, and others) or have multiple phone lines and modems (anything with more than 1 line was considered a BIG board). BBS's kept evolving and the few things that the BBS's provided (mentioned them above), thats basically the basis of the Internet. File sections that you'd download files from, webpages have that. Message boards that you can post and other users would reply (i.e., Slashdot!), online games, chat rooms, etc.
BBS's had their downfalls. Most people I knew enjoyed setting up the BBS but we were kids at the time and couldn't afford the phone line lol, but we kept plugging away designing board after board, just to do it. Also, if we want to point the finger at who killed BBS's, lets start thinking about the people that wrote the BBS software, then they stopped doing that when the Internet came out. They knew when it was time to quit also.
I'll admit I really do miss BBS's, but not because of the content of what they had, but because of "local" feeling you had when using them. You could post messages about something going on in a city you lived in, and other people would completely know what you were talking about because they just as local. I don't think BBS's died, they just evolved into something we know as the Internet. The Internet is everything the BEST BBS strived to be, without that local feeling.
If I had one wish, I would have hoped that at the end of the BBS evolution, that people would have been smart enough to realize that once the Internet hit with full force, we'd all lose contact with each other and that there should have been a common method for users of BBS's to smoothly migrate to the public Internet without losing contact with each other. God knows how many times my Internet email address or IM name has changed since BBS days, and over time you lose contact with people that matter. BBS's were all about contact, expression, and personal enjoyment. Since we had was ASCII and ANSI, and small computers with minimal amounts of memory, slow CPU's (C=64 = 1MHz) we made use with what we had. God I sound old.
I remember boards that I used to dial up, that had maybe 500 users, and I felt as if I knew about maybe 50-100 of them just by reading message posts, etc. Now there we have this huge BBS that we call the Interent, and I have no idea of how to find these people. It would have been nice to keep the contacts that I had on BBS's, but combine that effort to create something using the Internet so that people still have that "local" feeling that BBS's gave you.
Maybe someone should have developed a webpage that's focus is to allow users to submit names of BBS's, country it was from, state, area code, etc, so you can add your handle/name to it, and then list out your CURRENT Internet contact info. I'd love to have my old contacts back. Things were rockin' back then
I think a local wireless thing is a good idea but it's not a replacement for BBS's
I also really miss the animated menus
-Rainman1976
How were these questions answered when someone ran a BBS back in the '80's?
Answers....
Him
Him
Him
If he wants
If he wants
The best of the original BBS software lives on in the internet age!
Seems like it would suit your needs and more, plus it's multiplatform (Linux, Macintosh, PDA, Windows)
http://www.softarc.com/
Someone set up something similar in South Station in Boston. It's described as a WiFi Bubble, and supplies information about South Station, vendors in the station, and gives you the opportunity to win a magic fortune fish!
Any requests to web pages outside the bubble only result in being served the bubble index page. It's a nice demonstration of what you can do with an old iMac and an Airport. The administrator gives some information on how it was set up, but the page is only available inside the bubble.
Nonetheless, it can be done! And if you're lucky, maybe you'll get a magic fortune fish! (Ooo! Curls up on both ends- I'm passionate! Woo! Hoo!)
Whew! This water sure is cold!
Plenty of telnet BBS's Still exist. It may be better to join the community rather than open another empty bbs. www.synchro.net makes BBS Software. It's a community project. Lots of SysOps very few users these days.
What you're wanting to do sounds some what like the WiFi.Bedouin project.