Date: Fri, 16 Jun 95 11:11:51 MDT From: terry@cs.weber.edu (Terry Lambert) To: vandj@securenet.interax.net Cc: questions@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD 2.0 Message-ID: <9506161711.AA12257@cs.weber.edu> In-Reply-To: <9506152330.D3541Zr@securenet.interax.net> from "vandj@securenet.interax.net" at Jun 15, 95 11:30:03 pm
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> To Whom It May Concern; Well, since no one else has answered, I will. > I was advised to write to this address for information on FreeBSD 2.0 by > the Tech Support people at Walnut Creek CD Rom. Yes; this is a mailing list that many of the developers read. > At present, I run a BBS by Galacticomm one of the add-on's is the Internet > Connectivity option (ICO) which allows Telenet, FTP, Finger, DNS, and soon > will include SMTP, NNTP and rlogin. My problem is that all of my users > want WWW and with this ICO only this is not possible. Some of the other > Sysop's in my position have found a solution by allowing the customer to > Telnet to a second box running unix and a program called TIA which will > allow customers to then use NetScape etc. What I want to know is if I guess the real questions is whether your ICO + telnet + telnetd will allow for a sufficiently binary channel for TIA to work. > A) Will TIA run on FreeBSD 2.0 (I know that it runs on BSDI 1.1). I believe it will. I also believe there are several public domain equivalents that won't cost you or your users money. > B) To do this do I even need TIA can I assign each user an > address for there winsocket stack and have them up and going? TIA operates as a socket proxy. Basically, this means that you don't assign an address, that instead remote hosts believe that it is the host running TIA that is making the connection. One problem you might have with a Winsock scenario is that I assume these people are going to come into your BBS and then go through the ICO to the BSD box, login, get a prompt, and fire up the connection. I don't believe that standard WFWG Winsock support is capable of a "chat" this sophisticated, nor is it capable (by nature of the comm driver interface) of taking over after a user has done the same. The point of TIA and similar packages is that you replace your winsock with something else. I would personally try the public domain equivalents (SLuRP, etc.) before investing in that much TIA stuff. > C) Will Lynx (from Ukansas) run on FreeBSD 2.0 (This is for users of > older PC's 286 or older). Yes, it compiles right up. > D) Is there any documentation that is printed on FreeBSD 2.0 that I > can buy? There are the O'Reilly 4.4BSD books; FreeBSD 2.0 is based very much on BSD4.4 and most everything is the same. The O'Reilly (and other publisher's) sysadmin guides that deal with BSD are all particularly applicable, as are DNS and BIND guides, sendmail guides, etc., etc.. Basically, at least 1/3 of the existing UNIX literature is directly applicable to FreeBSD, and the other 2/3 are generally applicable. Even the Linux-specific books (like "The Linux Bible") are mostly applicable. 8-). There are also online documents in sgml which can be formated for LaTeX and printed, or simply referenced online via WWW browser at www.freebsd.org. There was talk at one time about someone who wrote an admin guide specifically for FreeBSD. I'm sorry, but I don't have the reference right now. > E) If all this is possible, can it be made possible that the user > will not require a login ie the unix box detects that the user is > from the BBS and just puts up either a menu or TIA etc. This is possible, though to get the tty modes correct, probably it wants to be integrated into telnetd. A menu is possible, no problem, though you may need to run it in the pty program (as opposed to just "pty" the device, it's a public domain program for accessing pty's) to get the terminal modes, etc. correct. You could use either a shell script or a binary image on a particular inetd port to do the work for you (modify /etc/services and /etc/inetd.conf to add your own service). You will probably want to turn on wrappers if you don't have a firewall set up to protect this service from access by any location other than the BBS ICO. > Any help will be greatly accepted when it comes to Unix, I don't have > very much experience to fall back on. If what I am tring to explain > is unclear and you wish to phone to clairfy the questions I can be > reached at 1-800-469-7774. > > I thank you in advance for any assistance you can give me. When you get this up and running, assuming you would not consider it to be competing with you, it would be appreciated if you could "dump" the information on your setup so that others elsewhere could duplicate it with little effort, making it a general feature of FreeBSD, if it is installed. Regards, Terry Lambert terry@cs.weber.edu --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
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