From: fenner@postscript.cs.psu.edu (Bill Fenner)
Subject: Re: Administrative questions
Organization: Penn State Computer Science
Date: Thu, 5 Nov 1992 15:47:30 GMT

In article <ESCHWART.92Nov4232721@netcom.Netcom.COM> eschwart@netcom.Netcom.COM (Eric Schwartz) writes:
|Distribution: comp

"comp" is an invalid distribution.  You probably wanted "world", or to leave
the Distribution: field empty.  It's likely that some people didn't see your
message because of this.

|Is there a way to increase the idle time before Waffle drops users out?
|How about for privileged users?

Look at STATIC.DOC .  The timeout is global, not for individual users.

|When I post to newgroups (local or USENET), I see a message like 
|"EXTERN: rnews -ueric" and then something like "Article queued for outgoing
|newsfeed."

Remove the "debug: extern" from your static file to get rid of the "EXTERN:"
message.  You can suppress the queueing message if you read FORUM.DOC .
Indeed they do go out through the feed, but can I at least suppress

|I heard the term "newuser.bat" once.  Is there such a feature?

Look at EXTERN.DOC, under the heading of "o  Contents of _system file:".

|How can I make
|a default "/user/username/waffle" file with a command to display my menu?

You could copy a default one using the newuser extern.  Files don't get
copied by default.

|What is the difference between an Access level and a Privilege level?

Access is for normal users; Privilege is for sysops.  Access determines
the amount of time you get, number of posts per day, etc. from those tables
in your static file.  Privilege determines what admin commands you can do,
whether or not you can shell, etc.

|How do these work together?  What must I put in /waffle/system/static to make
|sure that I'm not using any other magic numbers (like ranks) that complicate
|things even further?

Rank is a straw man; it has nothing to do with BBS privilege.

|Most messages that get displayed during quick logoffs (boots, bye, too many
|calls, time expired, etc.) get cut off before they get out through the modem.
|In other words, the carrier is dropped before the data is out.  How can I
|solve this?  Is there a character to create a 'pause'?

I haven't been able to solve this one yet.

|I read in the FAQ that you can add /waffle/admin/inbox to get a copy of all
|incoming mail.  It didn't work.  Any ideas?

Did you add rr.inbox to your static file?  (look at the end of rmail.doc .)

|By far the biggest problem is that I can't get the "locked: 19200" line in
|STATIC to work.  I have a Trailblazer Plus set for hardware flow control, 
|but every time I put the lock line in, I get garbage when I log in, at least
|at 2400 baud (not sure about 19.2 k).  Can anyone give me explicit STATIC 
|lines and modem settings for that?

Is your *modem* locked?  If the computer is locked, and the modem is not,
you will get garbage like this.  According to TELEBIT.DOC, you need to make
sure that S51=5 and S66=1.

|Probably related to that is a horrible symptom:  sometimes when I connect,
|Waffle just spews line after line of my ENTRY file as if I were holding
|down the return key.

Um, I'm not sure what you mean here.  The ENTRY file is displayed once, then
the "login :" entry from the static file is displayed.  That will repeat if
you hold down enter, is that what is happening?

|This seems like a flow control problem.

No, not really, it sounds like a modem-is-spewing-garbage problem.  Flow
control wouldn't cause the modem to send CR's to the computer.

|What do I do?

No suggestions here, other than to check all of your modem registers
carefully.

  Bill