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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).
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.
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.
People are actually pining for the bad old days of the regional bbs, when we clung desperately to even the most tenuous connection to other nets?
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Whatever software you use, make sure it supports the old online games like tradewars, pimpwars, global war, etc! I miss those old games and waiting to have to play my turn. I know there are alternatives on some telnet BBSs, but it's just not the same as waiting to dial in on Terminate or PCPlus and getting that busy signal. If I could be sitting at the local coffee shop, I would happily log in to whatever was available and check recent message boards and games, even though it'll never be the same as it was 15 years ago.
And these days, the magic distance is perhaps a quarter mile.
And you call that progress? ;)
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
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.
first suggestion - better make sure that anybody in the universe is interested in this project before you spend a lot of money and time on it. there's very little reason at all for anybody to participate in something like this when they can join the community of the internet at large, and still get the local flavor from local websites if they like.
d =9304955
having said that, you could probably accomplish just about everything you need with existing wireless access points with some hacked-up firmware. wi-fi box is offering free replacement firmware for the linksys WRT54G series access points that offers a captive portal and some advanced routing features including WDS. what this means is that you can display a splash page to anybody who types in an arbitrary URL (say, www.slashdot.org) and inform them that they only have access to a certain few pages (links provided of course.) with WDS you can chain multiple access point together wirelessly, although you may be best served splitting some areas into subnets and cabling them together with tradional CAT5.
there are other options for the WRT54G firmware - www.sveasoft.com is one of the most popular. just be careful with this one, because the author thinks that reselling GPL'd software for $20 is a great idea, and if you have the gall to say otherwise here on slashdot he'll ban your ass from his forums and ftp servers in a heartbeat. you can distribute his software as allowed by the GPL, but if he catches you doing it or questioning his policies he'll make sure you can't access the software anymore. here's my original post on sveasoft that lead to the banning in question: http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=109547&ci
the guy is a real pecker and probably doesn't deserve your $20 anyway.
This is a great idea, but I think you're limiting yourself artificially. You will probably have a hard time attracting wireless users to connect only to local content.
The BBSes that were really good were the ones that had decent content. If you lived in an area that had a lot of BBSes, the duller ones fell by the wayside pretty quickly. If anything kept them alive, it was the fact that you didn't get a busy signal when you tried to dial them.
Why not put something online that has very local content and let a broader cross-section participate? If the content is good, and you can get the word out, they will come.
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Give me liberty or give me something of equal or lesser value from your glossy 32-page catalog.
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.
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
&$&#*&*@(#&@#*()&!#(*@!#&@#()@ !#
NO CARRIER
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.)
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.
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!
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.
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Play Six Pack Man. I
Several posters have made glib comments about this idea being retro and unworthy.
Let me tell you why I see this sort of grass-roots things as the wave of the future.
First and formost, the primary feature of this system is that it has no recurring cost [well, assuming you are using solar]. Free is good.
Next, there is no controlling authority with rules, regulations and contracts. You know that your rights are severely limited in the contract you signed with your internet provider right? Freedom is good.
These intranet hotspots will be by definition local. They always talk about web communities, but they arent really. A bunch of anonymous jerks out trolling each other. This idea allows for locals to get together and be social. Community is good.
This sort of setup has no agenda. No chinese shyster selling penis pills, no corporation telling you what to think.
No agenda is good.
The most interesting thing is the possibilities that arise from synergy with other hotspots and the internet itself. If the number of local hotspots becomes large, and they become ubiquitous, there will be bridges formed between them..again all free, expanding the social network in interesting ways. New cultures will arise from these interactions without the debilitating noise of too many voices.
Culture is good.
I envision in the future rather than wi-fi, we will see wi-max versions of this idea. The neat thing about this is that you will be able to bridge to internet via your home isp when you wish to, and still use of the local hotspot would be free.
I think the biggest problem will not only be interest, but understanding. You're average user will be confused as to why this "network" doesn't have internet access. You have to remember that back in the BBS days, it was generally restricted to those who were not only in the know how, but could set it up (much easier to get internet access and surf the web). At any rate, good luck.