From: falc@asprgus.cloudnine.beadwrld (bUrd uPh daAr n0rtH)
Subject: MS/DOS BBS on the net w/out net connection (sick)
Keywords: kudge, MesS-DOS, WWIV, gross, disgusting
Reply-To: jpw@freedom.nmsu.edu
Organization: the aNk1e bYt0rz kLuB
Date: Thu, 17 Dec 1992 18:36:12 GMT

	...Mostly this is a test to see if I get here 'cause I havn't bothered
to try before...  But also I wanna post about this anyway...  Hack?  You be
the judge.  Kinda in a really warped distorted way.  Kludge?  There ya go.

A little background -- a friend of mine used to run a BBS in our home town --
a message board, really popular, cool people, etc...  Only thing is, we moved
to NMSU and most of our regular callers stayed in albuquerque (where the board
started out being) and so the usage went way down because people are too poor
to call long distance...  BUT.  They have internet accounts >-)

There is no good cheap BBS software for Unix I think.  Waffle might be okay,
but my friend and I both run linux, and nobody's compiled binaries for it (as
far as I know) and he doesn't want to pay for a source license...  And he had
WWIV on his other box -- a sick old MS/DOS thing.  But it ran the board, so he
had two machines side-by-side: one running Unix (in the form of Linux) and one
running WWIV on another.  So we set about trying to get the board on the net...

There's this cool program that was originally written for linux but works on
lots of machines now.  It's called term, written by Michael O'Reilly (Michael,
if you read this, that's a way cool hack) that lets you run a pseudo-slip 
connection, complete with TCP port redirection and X11 support, over a normal
modem connection from within a normal unix account...  So we set this up, and
with a little bit of redirection, we found that we could set up a telnet daemon
where a 'telnet nowhere.ukraine.anywhere 4269' would redirect port 4269 to 
the telnetd port on my friend's unix box.  From there, we set up a dummy 'bbs'
account which ran a router from stdin/stdout to /dev/bbs, which had a serial
port hung off of it and dumped into the BBS machine.   So you have a shell
script send out modem commands to the BBS router (to make the MS/DOS machine
think there's a modem connected to it) and then away you go.  So people could
telnet into an internet site on port 4269, get routed over a modem connection
to telnetd on my friend's home linux box, and from there to another router
over to the MS/DOS box, and access the board.  'Twas pretty cool when we 
finally got the whole schmear working, because my friend could also run stuff
out of his unix box on the same phone line without any problems (except that
if he started running remote X clients, the BBS response would suffer... oh 
well)...  Pretty spunky, I thought.

The board's back local now; turned out to be more trouble to keep it 
maintained (timeout problems, sysadmins at other schools getting freaked out
because of an unattended open socket, etc..) that it was worth, and mostly
we just wanted to see if we could do it...

-- 
/  falc@asprgus.cloudnine.beadwrld  | "If brute force doesn't work,           \
|  reply-to jpw@freedom.nmsu.edu    |  you're not using enough." - the aNk1eZ |
\         DISCLAIMER:  the Ank1e bYt0rZ kLuB *agrees* with what I say.        /
Newsgroups: alt.hackers