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PCjr Telnet Server Test

The world may not need another Telnet BBS, but I need a PCjr Telnet BBS. So it is coming. ;-0 A telnet BBS running on hardware that was current back in the heyday of the BBS is as authentic as it gets. And when the transition to IPV6 occurs, I'll be ready for that too.

wiwa64 said:
1. Add a broadcast, an echo and perhaps some more diagnostic features to turn it into a tiny tool for testing and debugging TCP/IP nets under DOS. This might not be terribly new, but still usefull and easy to do.
Click to expand...

When I add ICMP support I will add a ping command with some diagnostic capability. Besides responding to ping requests it is interesting to see what over traffic (both directed and broadcast) is being received by a specific machine. Initially I didn't think highly of another diagnostic tool that runs under DOS, but anything that makes setup and debugging easier is probably goodness.

wiwa64 said:
2. Turn it into a tool that allows to remotly control a DOS box via Telnet. To do this, the program would have to be able to go resident as TSR and hook into the timer interrupt, to regularly watch for incoming data. Any text coming from the remote client would have to be fed into the keyboard buffer and any changement on the screen (or the video buffer),
should be comunicated back to the remote end.
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This is very hard to do well, which is why it was left to commercial products. If people had used the DOS interrupts for reading the keyboard and writing to the screen it would be easy - hook the DOS interrupts to redirect the input and output and all is good. But very few programs did this. Performance was much faster through BIOS, and even faster with direct video writes.

I don't see much of a need for taking control of a DOS PC remotely anymore.


Here are the other things I'd like to do in the short term:

  • Enhance the test I just ran with some more user friendly features. I think I will use the code to demonstrate the PCjr on it's official 25th anniversary, which is November 1st.
  • Create a small Telnet client with ANSI terminal support. NCSA is the 'gold standard', but it is a very big program.
  • Create a small FTP client to make moving files easier. (I'm using Netcat to move files now)
 
Trixter said:
It doesn't. But what the world DOES need is a nice, tight, resident TCP/IP stack with a programming API, with source code.

I am quite serious in my claim to write a VNC client for oldskool machines if you can make this happen :)
Click to expand...

+1,000,000

i'm sure it would be much faster than mine. (lol)

i'm betting a DOS VNC client with nice tight ASM code would be usable on an 8088.
 
oh and mike, the world does have enough telnet BBSes but not one that will actually run directly from old pre-386 machines. all of those work over modem/nullmodem only. and have you ever tried the old DOS synchronet program on an 8088? UGH! painfully slow.

if you don't want to make one, i most definitely will!
 
Running again!

Running again!

If you missed it last time, here is your chance :)

I'm trying to get the user interface to be more friendly in time for Nov 1st, which is the 25th anniversary of the announcement of the PCjr. Here is what I've added/fixed recently:

  • Added passwords and a user registration system
  • Added a session timeout counter
  • Handle DEL in addition to Backspace
  • Fixed TCP reset handling (again)
  • Upgraded tracing on warning types of messages

You can register and play around at 97.86.233.68. It's running on the PCjr again with minimal tracing, so hopefully nothing goes wrong.

If things seem slow, remember that every character is being sent back and forth because the PCjr is doing the echoing. If you ping time to my home is more than 250ms, you may notice the lag while typing. That has nothing to do with running on an 8088 ... it's the nature of having long distance connections and character echoing.

(On the internal lan there is no lag at all.)

Thanks!
Mike
 
yes it's very cool now. mike and i chatted up a storm on it last night. check it out guys. (the future message board will be neato)
 
Still going ...

If you haven't looked around yet, it is very easy. Use your favorite telnet program and connect to 97.86.233.68. My router will port forward to the PCjr, which is standing by waiting for your call. ;-)

For windows users get to a DOS command prompt (Start->Run and the command to run is cmd) and then type:

telnet 97.86.233.68​


You should see something like this when it connects:

Welcome to Mike's DOS TCP/IP server

Please enter your userid or 'NEW' to register

Userid:
​


It is not a full fledged BBS yet, but I'm heading in that direction. Unlike other older machines running telnet BBSes, this machine is *not* connected to a hardware device or helper machine that converts the serial port characters to TCP/IP packets. All of the TCP/IP code (which I wrote from scratch) is running directly on the machine, and it is set to take up to 9 sessions at the same time. For a 4.77Mhz machine I think this is quite the accomplishment!

As always, yell if you have problems ...
 
From where I am at the moment I have 20+ hops to go through to get each character to and from the machine, and it is keeping up with my typing (100wpm). There is an occasional hiccup as it recovers from dropped packets, but that is expected.

On Windows you can use the pathping command to see how many hops your connection is making. If you have high ping latencies or an incredible number of hops then lag will be noticeable.
 
The Jr has been running for a few days now. Very little activity, but still, it didn't fall over itself. ;-0

I've added two features which might make things more interesting:

  • Comment: Leave a comment or view other comments. Works like an electronic guestbook
  • memdump: Look inside any memory location on the machine! You can prove to yourself that this a PCjr. :)

Existing userids and passwords will continue to work.

Mike
 
I'm just trying to find some esoteric (*) Telnet client and will then have a go. For a brief moment I was considering logging in from an AIX box, but that one has been taken offline years ago. Old Sparc Solaris may be esoteric enough, or perhaps I obtain a fully Emacs managed Telnet client. ;-)

(*) Just in case it would behave in an unexpected way that would throw your server application. That's what testing is for, right?
 
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