Dear all,
sorry for the long absence. I've been distracted during the past year by
too much work (both dayjob, as well as many FOSS projects) and by tons of
renovation related work in my house.
In any case, I finally found sime time to work on at least some of the TODO
items in thsi project. I'll spare you the details (some are in the wiki and
related tickets).
The high level goals remain: Have a portable setup consisting of:
* a PBX and reasonable numer of both analog and ISDN ports
* a Livingston PM3 RAS to avoid tons of individual modems and multiport serial
boards on the BBS side
* set up at least a few BBSs that users can explore
* a collection of physical modems, ISDN TA, and all related accessories (phone
line cables, RS232 cables, adapters, etc.) that users can borrow
The idea then is that at the event (36C3 will be at least the first one) people
can come to the "retro BBS assembly" or whatever it will be called, and connect
using terminal programs and modems/TAs which they can borrow on-site, or of course
bring any old equipment they may still have.
My status is as follows:
* physical PBX setup (wiring, etc) is complete (16x analog,8x S0,8x Up0)
* PBX configuration is complete
* Livingston PM3 is configured
* Synchronet BBS (one of the few BBS packages that are both FOSS and actively
maintained) has been set up in a lxc container
** telnet access works
** modem access via mgetty works
** modem access via SEXPOTS works
In parallel, a crew around the old BIONIC BBS has been reviving Zerberus from
the dead. I'm not up to speed in terms of their detailed status, but at the very
least, there's a Zerberus VM Image based on FreeDOS which works, even with real
analog modems handed into the VM (I just tested it this weekend).
My current work areas are:
* Linux SoftPBX with multiple E1 interfaces (probably FreeSWITCH with one or
two QuadE1 boards, as LCR doesn't support DAHDI boards, and HFC-E1 boards
mostly only have one port per PCI slot). This SoftPBX is going to be the
switch between the Portmaster and the Auerswald PBX, as well as possibly more
other PBXs in the future
* Get my Synchronet BBS connected to at least DOVE-Net, maybe even FidoNet
to populate Message Arease with Echomail before 36C3
* Test PM3->telnet->SynchroNet
* If there's time, play with other current Linux BBS software such as Mystic BBS
If anyone wants to join this setup at 36C3, by all means, please do so. I could
envision at least the following forms of contribution:
1) Run your own BBS. If you want to set up another BBS (or revive and
old one from a backup), by all means! I can hook you up either via
analog lines or S0-busses, or even only via telnet/rlogin from the
Portmaster.
2) Bring client-side systems. That could be anything from a serial
terminal [which we can hook up to a modem], or some vintage computer
(any flavor) with terminal software [which we can hook up to a
modem].
3) Help on-site e.g. build-up and teardown, but also during the event to
give support to users who show up and want to set up their Laptop
with a terminal program and one of the modems and log onto the BBSs
Crazy future goals (beyond 36C3):
* I actually bought four STM-1 add/drop multiplexers with 16 E1 ports each.
This would allow us to build a more distributed setup with PBXs at different
sites and fiber connections between them. Why not have a SDH backbone at
future CCC events :)
* Get back to the idea of improving the FOSS VoIP-Softmodem situation to
enable more people to use dial-up without any actual hardware
requirement.
Looking forward to any feedback.
Regards,
Harald
--
- Harald Welte <laforge(a)gnumonks.org> http://laforge.gnumonks.org/
============================================================================
"Privacy in residential applications is a desirable marketing option."
(ETSI EN 300 175-7 Ch. A6)
Hi!
Still someone alive here and interested in BBS and Fidonet? Old style communication?
Here’s an uptodate list/count of how many nodes are still active in Germany (Region24):
TB> Sysops Netz 2:240 = 18
TB> Sysops Netz 2:246 = 3
TB> Sysops Netz 2:2432 = 1
TB> Sysops Netz 2:2443 = 0
TB> Sysops Netz 2:2448 = 6
TB> Sysops Netz 2:2449 = 1
TB> Sysops Netz 2:2452 = 4
TB> Sysops Netz 2:2454 = 1
TB> Sysops Netz 2:2490 = 3
TB> -+——————————
TB> Summe = 37
So, it’s a good moment to join Fidonet. There is everything available to run Fido on a Linux/Unix box as well as on PC, like binkd, Husky, OpenXP for Points, GoldEd+, etc…
If you like, you can also still use old modems to poll or use HotDogEd on Android.
--
Ciao... // http://blog.windfluechter.net
Ingo \X/ XMPP: ij(a)jabber.windfluechter.net
gpg pubkey: http://www.juergensmann.de/ij_public_key.asc
Servus,
There are actually multiple FOSS Softmodems.
This one, for example, is based on spandsp:
https://github.com/proquar/asterisk-Softmodem
This one was written by myself and handles the data-link protocoll of
BTX for error-free communications:
https://github.com/Casandro/btx_modem
It's also just 527 lines of code with the only external dependency being
Asterisk.
Then there's also IAXModem, but that's mainly aimed at Faxes.
There's actually a big advantage of using software based modems over
hardware based ones. With IP-Telephony it is vital to have proper
clocks. Unfortunately many bad ATAs have really bad clocks. So your
sender might send out its voice with 8010 Hz sampling rate, while the
receiver might run at 7090 Hz That means that eventually you will have
buffers running over and samples being thrown away. This is very bad for
modems and one of the reasons why T.38 was invented. However with a
software based modem you can just send a packet of data for every packet
you get, so essentially, if it isn't converted to TDM in the middle,
you'll adapt to the speed of the ATA.
(The obvious sane solution to that would of course be to simply use NTP
to determine the frequency error of your system and then adjust your
sample rate so it'll be precisely 8kHz on average. However sane people
usually don't work in that field because of SIP)
Servus
Christian
Hello,
i read about this project that i found quite exciting in it's goals:
http://lists.osmocom.org/pipermail/bbs-revival/2018-January/000003.html
With a friend during the (very limited) spare time we're developing a
pure python modern based SIP/RTP/G711 wardialer, to let younger
generation get having fun with old school phreaking stuff.
Because of the DSP modem related complexities, we've decided to focus
only on:
- Fast signaling scanning of phone prefixes to find existing phone numbers
- Fast scanning on existing phone numbers by recording some 10-15s of
audio, then processing it
It will be something like:
./wardial.py -h sip-hostname -p port -u username -p password -c parallel
channel -r range-XX-XXX (or --input numberlist) -o logfile --fast (fast
scan to check which number exists without looking for carriers)
--wait-between-calls --timeout
However the final goal would be also to hook a software modem to make an
handshake with the remote modem, grab the banner but also provide a
virtual serial interface to let play with the remote system using
minicom or whatever terminal emulation software.
But there's no softmodem and easy to be hooked piece of code to do it,
until now, as i saw this lovely project recovering linmodem.
I wanted to share our goals as will be keeping an eye on the project
where the linmodem/voip/virtualserial integration could be a really nice
companion to complete a modern wardialing kit for 2018 :-)
-naif
Hi there!
I just stumbled on this list, it seems like the project just started, yes?
I was a frequent BBS user in the 90's and still "call" (by telnet) BBS' from time to time, most frequently a BBS in Finland (it's on a VPS these days so I'm not sure it's actually hosted _in_ Finland anymore) called Haciend El Bananas. I recommend it, it's focused on ANSI art and bullshit-chat and there might be some files to download also but I'm not so interested in that anymore so I don't keep track. I use Syncterm to call those boards that use MS-DOS character graphics, it works pretty well. Regular *nix shell telnet can connect too but the ANSI will look like vomit.
Fidonet isn't the only BBS echo active out there, on the top of my head I can remember Agoranet, Retronet and Zeronet (for the elite! ;)).
I didn't have access to internet when Usenet was still a thing so I'd also be interested in some Usenet/UUCP revival. I check som NNTP news from time to time but the traffic is real low nowadays if you go outside the binary groups.
Outside household python scripting I can't code but I can contribute something else eventually I hope.
Cheers,
Ola
Another Hi,
used to run 2:2449/845 on the Amiga with CNet and Trapdoor.
Stopped operating the BBS somewhere around '94 or something.
Used to be an A3000T040 with 3 MFCIII with a bunch of Courier
V.Everything.
Started with Linux because it got an IP Stack which was a lot more
stable than the AmiTCP stuff. So i started polling "real email" via
UUCP to a Linux box - then via UUCP over IP on a local Arcnet to
the Amiga via UUCP over IP to connect all BBS users to "real email".
Still using UUCP (over SSL) for most of my email.
Fido used to be a PITA with CNet as it got the implementation of
zone gates wrong so mails to a different zone didnt work out of
the box. I remember binary patching the CNet binaries.
Memory is pretty vague - Its a long time ago and uucp map files,
fido nodelists are long gone - My V.Everythings still exist though.
Flo
--
Florian Lohoff f(a)zz.de
UTF-8 Test: The 🐈 ran after a 🐁, but the 🐁 ran away
