The Major BBS Forums (Archive)

Well, if you recall, I was originally intending to put majormud on its own server, then the rest of the dos games on another one, running from the wgnt ico dma client, but there was a hiccup: the ICO DMA client marries the IP address of the first DMA server it connects to on worldgroup's start. At least that's what I thought.

Many months later, I decided to try this theory out, because I was working on a new DOS/DMA server for Nostalgia BBS, something a bit faster, that will run on my future dos raid configuration. I had an extra dos network card (Actually, I think I bought about 8 or 10 of them a couple years back on ebay) and a hard drive that was going to be my majormud server, which basically had all of the elements of the current DMA server that's online now, just in an earlier config stage. So, basically, it was all plug and play.

I put in the major tcp/ip dma server code on the test server, put in the tcp/ip act codes on my current dma server, to use it as a dma client as well as a server, and then I tested it out, both from the current dma server and eventually from the main bbs.

The setup is pretty finnicky, because in this configuration, you have two sets of DMA RULES/Instructions. and although I'm in the early stages of testing this, I can tell you that it does work, and the main bbs's ICO DMA client does not block the 2nd DMA server, because it really never sees it, as the first dma server passes everything on to the 2nd, if that makes sense.

In order to do this, you obviously have to have a legit copy of 1 DMA server. The only downside I see to this is that the speed seems to decrease a bit when going to the 2nd dma server, and I'm sure if you kept stacking dma servers, the slowness would eventually become unbearable. In this setup, every dma server in the chain would have to process every keystroke etc.

Well, I did manage to get it working, but there are several problems, which would make it completely unusable. First of all, it goes through bits of lag when connected that can last several minutes, while other times, it just lags a little, but eventually, both DMA servers stop working. One will completely ignore all connections, and the other will reject connections with a code-4.

The questions are why it's rejecting the connection and are there any ways to get around it?

Well, I've made no progress toward finding out a way to handle this, but I have ruled out another way...

I was reading on the net about creating two completely different networks and hooking both to one computer. By doing this, the one computer has access to both networks, but other computers on network A and network B can't see each other.

So, I put a DMA server on Network A and Network B - There's no way the DMA servers could have seen each other, but when tested, it still didn't work. What this means is that there are checks in both the client and the server portion of the DMA server..

If some one could create a generic DMA client, they should be able to do this multi-network trick, to expand their BBS, but you'd still have to have 1 legit DMA server license code, and most people aren't willing to spend the money on the DMA server license.