been awhile - reminiscing
Posted: Sun May 06, 2012 3:52 pm
It's been awhile since I've been here, probably longer since I've logged on to a BBS at all. I've been spending a lot of time in Texas, as well as fighting for causes. Every once in awhile, I look back and reminisce about the good ol' BBS days, as well as both the good and bad of running Nostalgia BBS in a rural area, where Internet access is up and down.
When I ran Nostalgia BBS and was forced to shut it down, on two separate occasions, it was because of our DSL Internet. I changed the lines myself a couple of times and even had the phone/Internet company come out and change the lines and replace the box. It was still hit or miss, and certain seasons seemed to have longer outages.
When I first put MajorMud on-line, an early DOS version, everything ran pretty good, but some of the players wanted the newest and best version, and while trying to upgrade that version and trying to create an automated backup system, it somehow got corrupted, and it didn't ever run the same again, crashing often. I eventually went to the windows version, using a backed up version from Lost Gonzo BBS. Unfortunately, the accounts were deleted off of majormud and the bbs (they came that way) and somehow, limited items were permanently gone from the game, and people complained more.
In the end, I was running two battery backup systems, the main worldgroup (and spacequest) server, a windows MajorMud server, a synchronet server, a dma server, a mutants server, an SQL server, and a crossroads of the elements server.
Over time, I realized a large majority of the games were crashing various servers. The windows version of Mutants and Farwest trivia were large problems. Farwest trivia took awhile to figure out, because the server would sometimes work for 2-3 days, sometimes even a week or two before it would hang up on cleanup. Mutants, I configured the hell out of, to get over half of the crashes stopped, but certain levels (time periods) and enemies on those levels still made the system crash.
It would have been nice to have ran everything on three servers, but I had to isolate certain games so that they would not cause problems with the main server. Even then, the main server would randomly crash, the dma server would randomly crash, etc. You also have the issues with the DOS memory limit and not having enough DMA server licenses to add everything you want to the system.
If there was a good, easy way to create a backup system, my Internet didn't have the issues it did, and I could get more DMA licenses, I believe a good BBS could really be put online. Who's going to shell out thousands of dollars for DMA codes though? If we could all go back in time and buy established BBS systems that died after the BBS crash of the mid 90s, then that wouldn't be a problem.
I'm not planning to open Nostalgia BBS back up. The only thing that would make me reconsider would be having a stable Internet, which would most likely mean moving away. That's not going to happen any time soon. Anyway, I've given all of my BBS stuff to Mr. Brad, of Lost Gonzo BBS. If anyone wants to move to Mankato to help him setup and run a super BBS, then talk to him about it! :/
With that said, I am considering putting a PCBoard system on-line in the future, more for novelty.
When I ran Nostalgia BBS and was forced to shut it down, on two separate occasions, it was because of our DSL Internet. I changed the lines myself a couple of times and even had the phone/Internet company come out and change the lines and replace the box. It was still hit or miss, and certain seasons seemed to have longer outages.
When I first put MajorMud on-line, an early DOS version, everything ran pretty good, but some of the players wanted the newest and best version, and while trying to upgrade that version and trying to create an automated backup system, it somehow got corrupted, and it didn't ever run the same again, crashing often. I eventually went to the windows version, using a backed up version from Lost Gonzo BBS. Unfortunately, the accounts were deleted off of majormud and the bbs (they came that way) and somehow, limited items were permanently gone from the game, and people complained more.
In the end, I was running two battery backup systems, the main worldgroup (and spacequest) server, a windows MajorMud server, a synchronet server, a dma server, a mutants server, an SQL server, and a crossroads of the elements server.
Over time, I realized a large majority of the games were crashing various servers. The windows version of Mutants and Farwest trivia were large problems. Farwest trivia took awhile to figure out, because the server would sometimes work for 2-3 days, sometimes even a week or two before it would hang up on cleanup. Mutants, I configured the hell out of, to get over half of the crashes stopped, but certain levels (time periods) and enemies on those levels still made the system crash.
It would have been nice to have ran everything on three servers, but I had to isolate certain games so that they would not cause problems with the main server. Even then, the main server would randomly crash, the dma server would randomly crash, etc. You also have the issues with the DOS memory limit and not having enough DMA server licenses to add everything you want to the system.
If there was a good, easy way to create a backup system, my Internet didn't have the issues it did, and I could get more DMA licenses, I believe a good BBS could really be put online. Who's going to shell out thousands of dollars for DMA codes though? If we could all go back in time and buy established BBS systems that died after the BBS crash of the mid 90s, then that wouldn't be a problem.
I'm not planning to open Nostalgia BBS back up. The only thing that would make me reconsider would be having a stable Internet, which would most likely mean moving away. That's not going to happen any time soon. Anyway, I've given all of my BBS stuff to Mr. Brad, of Lost Gonzo BBS. If anyone wants to move to Mankato to help him setup and run a super BBS, then talk to him about it! :/
With that said, I am considering putting a PCBoard system on-line in the future, more for novelty.
