• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Telnet BBS Test

Yep, I saw that your registered but had not tried to leave a message. About 70 people have registered, and a smaller subset have come back a few times and have left messages.

I'd like to get more traffic to test it, but other than for trying to post it on Slashdot I think I'm out of options. I also don't want to be too annoying. :)

This test has been going well - up over four days now. I'll know better how well it went after I shut it down and look at the error log. I've been logging 'weird' conditions like Telnet options I didn't handle and strange TCP/IP packets, but I can't see the log until everything is shut down.

Mike
 
Still going!

Main menu -> stats

Server started: Fri Jun 19 23:58:37 2009
Session start: Thu Jun 25 19:16:42 2009
Current time: Thu Jun 25 19:34:13 2009

Active sessions 1, Max Active sessions 5, Total Sessions: 239

Registered users: 73

Tcp Pkts Sent 127742 Rcvd 107760 Retrans 4393 Seq/Ack errs 2797 Dropped 0
Pkt stats: Incoming pkts: 112319 Dropped: 0 Sent: 132501

Main menu ->​


Notice the packet counts ... over 200,000 packets in and out. The retransmitted packet count is artificially high due to a configuration error in the code - that is normally around 1.5% of the sent packets, not 4%.

From the 'info' command:

Bios date: 06/01/83 Dos version 5.02 Type: (fd) PCjr 4860
Free memory: 248016 bytes, Local heap: Ok, Far heap: Ok
​

248K free, even with DOS 5, a bunch of device drivers, the packet driver, and a 80KB RAM disk. (It's been like that since it started so I know that I'm not leaking memory.)

Thanks to all of you who have signed in and played around! It's going to be up for a little while longer. When I finally do shut it down I'll be looking through the error logs to see what strange things I might need to deal with.


Mike
 
Starshadow said:
did you shut it down? I can't log on anymore.:(
Click to expand...

Around 3:30 in the morning .. it had been up for a week and we had some major thunderstorms coming in. I was copying down statistics while the lightning was illuminating the room.

Total uptime was around one week, 3 hours. In that time the machine sent 132067 TCP/IP packets and received 111346. 72 users registers and left around 70 messages.

The most visible bug was my retransmit timer. Due to a misconfiguration it was timing out on packets 10x faster than it should, so there were a lot more retransmitted packets than normal. This lead to some dropped connections - if a packet has to be retransmitted more than 6 times I assume the connection is dead.

There are some telnet options that I received and did not answer - I'm going to dig into those to see if that is something I should fix. There are also some warning from my TCP stack I'd like to look into deeper.

Overall, it was a great test. I think the machine is more than capable of handling a multi-user telnet BBS with reasonable responsiveness.

I'd like to thank everybody who signed in and poked around. I had connections from New Zealand, the UK, Canada, Brazil, and many points in the US. The oldest machine that connected was your Mac - most others seemed to be using Windows or Linux.


Mike
 
That little Mac will see many Telnet servers from now on. It may not can run a decent web browser, but it can do telnet, BBS, and file sharing with my iMac ( great way to get around that 800k floppy drive btw).

Its next stop will be the Crays at Cray Cyber, once they get one up and going again.
 
mbbrutman said:
The oldest machine that connected was your Mac - most others seemed to be using Windows or Linux.
Click to expand...

Hey - I connected several times with my Compaq Portable/286. Although that may be right around the same vintage as the Mac. But still. I should at least get honorable mention :)

Anyone know of a more "complete" DOS telnet application? I was using MT, a little program I found quite a while back. It works very well, but it doesn't seem to send an identification string, so the host computer doesn't know what kind of terminal it's emulating. It's supposed to support VT102, but I'm skeptical. Since the client doesn't get detected, I had to modify the keyboard mapping file to change the backspace key to be a Control-H.

-Ian
 
A Compaq Portable/286 is definitely a worthy contender!

I'm wondering if MT doesn't respond to the Telnet 'Do Terminal Type' command. I think that very early Telnet clients might not have done this - I remember in the early 90s having to set my terminal type explicitly when I logged in.

I think that my code accepts either 'Rubout' (ASCII 127) or Ctrl-H (ASCII 8) for backspace, so you should not have had to change the key mapping. I'll look into that.


Mike
 
i've connected from an XT clone in a QB "telnet" app... that might be the oldest that has connected. :p
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top