BBS is back online… again!

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Well it certainly is the trade off, hosting  in the ‘cloud’ means you really don’t own anything.  But at the same time it’s not subject to my less than par power, internet connection…

But as long as you remember to backup you can always fish data out, and get back online.  So I think its about a week stale, but its a heck of a lot better than down completely.

And I’ve got to rave about BlueVM, I was kind of bummed about my last VPS basically going under so I was thinking about giving up all together, when I found this offer for $1.50 USD a month!  So how could I go wrong??  So far the server feels nice & snappy, my Qemu processes is running without issue, and its already completed a sync with vert.synchro.net and I’m sure it’ll get back onto the list.

For people with flash enabled browsers, click here or just telnet to bbs.superglobalmegacorp.com ..

6 thoughts on “BBS is back online… again!”

  1. Hi neozeed, how did you route port 23 to the qemu instance? I’m trying to achieve something similar but I’m using bochs rather than qemu because I can throttle the CPU usage way down, however networking with slirp seems to mean I can’t route any incoming requests from the VPS to the bochs VM.

    • Can you put a ‘secondary’ ip address on the loopback adapter? or install a second one (with a non 127.0.0.1 address)..? If you can, then you just NAT it from within the VM… Sadly the cheaper hosting stuff won’t let you do anything that ‘creative’, esp altering routing ….

      I launch my qemu under screen, and use cpulimit to make sure it never runs at 100% CPU …

      • Yeah it’s a cheap VPS and I don’t know if I could screw around with modules to get NAT set up.

        I found the solution tho! I decided to look at the slirp documentation rather than bochs, and one of the first things I read was that slirp firewalls the “guest”, which explains why I wasn’t able to communicate with the VM from outside.

        HOWEVER, I was able to put this single line in ~/.slirprc :

        redir tcp 5023 to 23

        That’s all it needs for port 5023 of the VPS to be redirected to the telnet port of the VM. Easy 🙂

          • I haven’t really gotten that far.

            I had read your posts about setting up a board on OS/2 with SIO/vmodem, it all sounded pretty ideal but I’ve never used OS/2 so the experience and nostalgia weren’t there for me.

            I ended up using NT4 for the modest resource requirements (it’s around win95 era except stable..), bochs is really rough around the edges so it’s running a 500MB flat image file for the hard drive.

            Renegade is the BBS software (purely for nostalgia, I’m fairly sure it’s terrible software) and net2bbs/netfoss for the telnet solution.

          • NT 4.0 is a great OS, I love the terminal server edition myself. I know it can be a bit daunting setting this stuff up, but once its working its great!

            Also keep in mind that bochs interprets 80386 instructions while Qemu does dynamic translation making it much faster…

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