The Major BBS Forums (Archive)

I've spent thousands of hours working on Nostalgia BBS since 2005 or 2006, but then, I took on a door game server, and then a DMA server, and now MajorMud, and very soon, a 2nd (And possibly third) BBS entirely. All in all, my plans currently are to:

Replace or upgrade all of the servers - The new DMA server is already online, but I've still got to replace the main server and door game server. I've already bought a xeon 3.06ghz server to replace the main and am waiting on hard drives for raid mirroring on it.

Setup backup systems for all of the servers, through raid mirroring, copying to 2nd hard drives, cd-r, dvd-r, tape, zip, mapped networked shared drives, or whatever.. this is not even close to being complete.

Re-Setup Lost Gonzo BBS, most likely on a DOS system.

Setup a PHP/SQL server, for webgames and some private stuff, on my old xseries 342 eserver - still need hard drives before that project gets started.

Converting over the wi-fi connection to wired, with a better, more professional router (currently using a wrt54g router).. This wi-fi setup cost probably 3 times more than a wired would have, with all of the bridges, repeaters, hubs, switches, nic cards, etc, and I really wish I would have went with wired in the first place now.

Need more battery backups, as all of the server power supplies are rated at around 3000 watts, plus all of the switches, monitors, and other doo-dads, and my largest battery backup is only rated at 750 watts.

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My ultimate goal for Lost Gonzo BBS, the DMA server, and perhaps the door game server, just a few days ago, would have been to just set it all up again and as soon as Brad and I both had static IPs, send him all of those things, once we got a good backup system established, and let him host them for both our boards (And any one else that wanted access to the DMA server, or door game server, as I've found a way to allow it to work through the DMA server with no problems.) The problem with my connection and why I wouldn't want to host a DMA server for other boards is because my ISP isn't very stable, and every time a storm occurs or something, it goes out or is off and on. We get probably six months of storms out of the year, if not slightly more. Whoever said Florida was a tropical paradise?

But after speaking with Brad, it seems that he's about done with wanting to host Lost Gonzo BBS himself, although I'm trying to talk him in to hosting the board again one day.

As far as right now, I think he just wants to be the Sysop, and we're trying to work out some details regarding software, licensing, and hardware and such now.

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We had 15 people online about a week or 2 back, the most ever on my board, and I was kind of frantic, because there was only 16 nodes configured at the time. So, I ended up logging myself off just to make another node available and then the next morning, upped the nodes to 32.

Even now, there are at least a few people online 24/7, and that makes it difficult scheduling downtime, even if it's something that'll take as little as a couple minutes to configure something. Now, I do all of the config stuff at the 7am cleanup time. Now, I worry about how the wi-fi connection, the router, and the ISP are going to hold out when there are a bunch of people online.

I need a break, but that's not going to happen for several months at least lol...

Malakai wrote:I've spent thousands of hours working on Nostalgia BBS since 2005 or 2006, but then, I took on a door game server, and then a DMA server, and now MajorMud, and very soon, a 2nd (And possibly third) BBS entirely. All in all, my plans currently are to:

Replace or upgrade all of the servers - The new DMA server is already online, but I've still got to replace the main server and door game server. I've already bought a xeon 3.06ghz server to replace the main and am waiting on hard drives for raid mirroring on it.

Setup backup systems for all of the servers, through raid mirroring, copying to 2nd hard drives, cd-r, dvd-r, tape, zip, mapped networked shared drives, or whatever.. this is not even close to being complete.

Re-Setup Lost Gonzo BBS, most likely on a DOS system.

Setup a PHP/SQL server, for webgames and some private stuff, on my old xseries 342 eserver - still need hard drives before that project gets started.

Converting over the wi-fi connection to wired, with a better, more professional router (currently using a wrt54g router).. This wi-fi setup cost probably 3 times more than a wired would have, with all of the bridges, repeaters, hubs, switches, nic cards, etc, and I really wish I would have went with wired in the first place now.

Need more battery backups, as all of the server power supplies are rated at around 3000 watts, plus all of the switches, monitors, and other doo-dads, and my largest battery backup is only rated at 750 watts.

-

My ultimate goal for Lost Gonzo BBS, the DMA server, and perhaps the door game server, just a few days ago, would have been to just set it all up again and as soon as Brad and I both had static IPs, send him all of those things, once we got a good backup system established, and let him host them for both our boards (And any one else that wanted access to the DMA server, or door game server, as I've found a way to allow it to work through the DMA server with no problems.) The problem with my connection and why I wouldn't want to host a DMA server for other boards is because my ISP isn't very stable, and every time a storm occurs or something, it goes out or is off and on. We get probably six months of storms out of the year, if not slightly more. Whoever said Florida was a tropical paradise?

But after speaking with Brad, it seems that he's about done with wanting to host Lost Gonzo BBS himself, although I'm trying to talk him in to hosting the board again one day.

As far as right now, I think he just wants to be the Sysop, and we're trying to work out some details regarding software, licensing, and hardware and such now.

-

We had 15 people online about a week or 2 back, the most ever on my board, and I was kind of frantic, because there was only 16 nodes configured at the time. So, I ended up logging myself off just to make another node available and then the next morning, upped the nodes to 32.

Even now, there are at least a few people online 24/7, and that makes it difficult scheduling downtime, even if it's something that'll take as little as a couple minutes to configure something. Now, I do all of the config stuff at the 7am cleanup time. Now, I worry about how the wi-fi connection, the router, and the ISP are going to hold out when there are a bunch of people online.

I need a break, but that's not going to happen for several months at least lol...

Well I must say your not alone with the future plans for your bbs, I am working toward a similar goal. Though the dma software isn't in the budget.

I use a second server for when I want to do work on the main bbs's hardware. Just copy over the bbs dir and switch the ip to send web requests in the router. If its software I do the config on the test/dev/backup server then move the new config to main server. This keeps the downtime to about 10-15 min either way.

Keep up the work you'll get thier in time, after all you set the schedule.
Just wait till you start with the php/sql

Hopefully Questman and company can get the galsql.dll interface completed.

Right before Nostalgia BBS went down the first time, we did a huge upgrade to the board and the door game server. This took a huge amount of time because the board was still online, and I had to do like 5 minutes here, 15 minutes there, to do things.

Unfortunately, we had so many technical issues after that, and the board had to be brought down, but when the board was being prepped for re-opening, it gave me a lot of time to put in a few ideas that I couldn't put in on the first big reveal. I wasn't on a scheduled downtime and didn't have time limits. That was probably in the thousand hour range if not more.

After that, I pretty much said I'm done with the board. I just want to get some battery backups, let it stay online and do what it needed with out sysop intervention, and that's the way it was for awhile..

and here we are again lol

gotta go now.. cleanup time, gotta work on the servers

Well, I am totally exhausted from working three weeks or so straight on the new DMA server. Even after getting it online, I've had problems, but maybe, just maybe, it's fixed.. Even have the daily backups working now (through another hard drive, not through ms network)

I can't believe all of this work can go in to just upgrading one "simple" DOS machine. I'm going to bed, will get up in the morning and check on the dma server to make sure it's still up and online, and then have my first R&R day in weeks! I didn't even take the 4th of July off!!!

Well, the problems keep coming. I think the mirror image stuff tore up not just the backup drive I was working on but also the main bbs drive. I've ran several database recoveries, but I really don't think that's going to help much now.

Most likely, if the problems keep happening, I'll have to start the DMA server from scratch. The good news is that if I do start from scratch, I can use the newest MMUD and won't have to worry about sticking with 1.11e. The bad news, of course, is that it's going to wipe out all of the player's characters, scores, etc in all of the games hosted on the DMA server, as well as put me to work on it for another week or so..

Well, I'm 100% sure that everything has to be started from scratch again, as far as the DMA server goes. Like I said, this will give me a chance to put the newest majormud online version online, but I'm going crazy spending all of this time working on it!!

Malakai wrote:Well, I'm 100% sure that everything has to be started from scratch again, as far as the DMA server goes. Like I said, this will give me a chance to put the newest majormud online version online, but I'm going crazy spending all of this time working on it!!

One day youll be able sit back and put your feet up, then enjoy all the hard work

Well, the good news is that I've got a new DMA server installed, everything from scratch, except MajorMud. Some of the majormud players wanted me to try to salvage the game. So, this *IS* the last ditch effort in salvaging that, but everything else was scrapped and re-installed.

Not everything is re-installed yet, like the demos and some of the small/unpopular games, but all of the popular stuff is back online. I'm just testing it all out and hoping that majormud doesn't start crashing the whole board. If it doesn't within a couple days, I'll put it the server back in the office where it's on a battery backup system and hope for the best.

It's starting to look like the only way we'll get a new (legit) majormud game up will be to put up another BBS lol... I'm wanting to work on the lost gonzo thing as soon as the main server is done getting upgraded, but most of that is up to Brad and how fast he can get his files and such ready. He told me he spent like 9 hours looking through boatloads of backups the other day and thought it could take him another six months to go through it all.

Apparently, he supposedly had it organized, with 250+ printed pages telling where everything was, but who knows? lol - He probably has some platinum stuff in his archives that no one else has...

Well, the DMA server has been running for about 2 days with no crashes now, and 90% of all of the config stuff is done. So, I'd say we're good to go with it..

Now, I have to start working on the new main server.