Someone with the cash should setup a bbs-like server for public use

unisys

unisys

Like you can ssh into node.freebsd.org and get access to software and source code and use stuff like remote x11 and nfs

You can even setup an IRC server or news group on it and do freebsd development exclusively on the server with remote x11 XEmacs, and all apps update with the server

Just a fun little thing for the community

Infact, it could be used to setup zones or even get new developers to the project

Wish I could detail more but I got bad weed lol =(

additionally you can include a command to convert a compiled version of freebsd from the public server into an iso

Or use bhyve, and yeah a command to convert a fresh compile of freebsd to iso would be nice! Think you just need to make an image with a boot code
 
Someone with cash should set this up so you can use it for free? But besides that, it will take all of 5 minutes for this to get ransacked.

Anyway, if you want a server on the internet with all that stuff I suggest you get a cheap VPS and pay for it yourself.
 
unisys said:
Like you can ssh into node.freebsd.org and get access to software and source code and use stuff like remote x11 and nfs

You can even setup an IRC server or news group on it and do freebsd development exclusively on the server with remote x11 XEmacs, and all apps update with the server

Just a fun little thing for the community

Infact, it could be used to setup zones or even get new developers to the project

Wish I could detail more but I got bad weed lol =(

additionally you can include a command to convert a compiled version of freebsd from the public server into an iso

Or use bhyve, and yeah a command to convert a fresh compile of freebsd to iso would be nice! Think you just need to make an image with a boot code
Click to expand...
What you want it is called pubnixes (public access unix system). I suggest that you take a look at Tildeverse, tilde.team and tilde.institute (there are others).

PS.: I'm on tilde.team.
 
My only gripe with that stuff is "where did all the overly-political tumblrinas come from in those spaces"? otherwise they seem pretty cool...

a BBS would be nice though
 
On the big cloud providers, you can set up a FreeBSD virtual machine. And they mostly have a free tier: if the machine you set up is small enough (I think 1 core, 8 gig RAM, 30GB disk or so), you don't have to pay.

EDIT: It is only 1 gig of RAM on the free tier!
 
ralphbsz said:
if the machine you set up is small enough
Click to expand...
And a FreeBSD system can do useful work in that minimal system.
But try and run Windows on the minimum requirements? Ha. You're gonna need a bigger swap file to even boot and then toss in all the modal dialogs saying "You moved the mouse, are you sure you want to do that"...
 
You mean a FreeBSD specific Bulletin Board System? Why not a general purpose BSD and similar OS BBS system? Or specifically an official BBS on the freebsd.org domain? It seems like, there would be opensource software, which can be used to run one.

If running ones own BBS, using a hosting provider isn't expensive. Some services cost more than others, yet, all are affordable. Perhaps when there's an excess of users, it will cost more, but I suspect a successful operation, still wouldn't have the amount of traffic which would require a better service plan. A hosting plan would need to offer access to the correct protocols, if aside from basic ones like HTTP(S). It would probably cost less than what you're smoking.

I remember of bulletin boards in the late 90's, when I first had basic home access to the Internet. I've had and used computers, since the 80's, but didn't access the Internet, until later. If there was more to the Internet than bulletin boards at that time, I missed out on that. I'm now fascinated about the idea of what BBS could do in this age, when it has become unpopular a long time ago. I wonder how BBS could be different than what XMPP (Jabber) messaging and its extended protocols can do.

I only know how to use basic services for HTTP and a few other things on a hosting provider, which they offer. That wouldn't include specialty services like running specialized personal servers like XMPP or anything like BBS. Someone could use ones own computer to host that software, but it would have to be on 24/7 and perhaps need backup power and computer. Still, have to pay for the domain name. It would be interesting to know how to run any kind of server like that limited to a LAN. I barely know how to set up FreeBSD on my computer the way I like it, but I learned enough to do this.

I would like to see a How-To on BBS, and on what it can do for this age, even if it's largely nostalgia.
 
ralphbsz said:
On the big cloud providers, you can set up a FreeBSD virtual machine. And they mostly have a free tier: if the machine you set up is small enough (I think 1 core, 8 gig RAM, 30GB disk or so), you don't have to pay.
Click to expand...
I pay 1 EUR/Month for 500 MB Ram and 20 GB hard disk virtual machine.
Compared with what you say, it is expensive.
 
mer said:
And a FreeBSD system can do useful work in that minimal system.
Click to expand...
I use one of those "free" cloud machines myself, as a monitoring / backup server for my home setup. It needs to be located far away, to be useful when the network connection to our home breaks. Works fabulously.

The only catch is that "free" is not exactly free. While the basic CPU, disk and memory are all within the free tier, I end up incurring networking charges, which are about $0.05 per month. I think those networking charges are actually not for useful traffic, but for hackers based in China who are probing my system; I should see whether I can stop that traffic at the router level above, but a few pennies per months are not worth an hour of my time to debug.

But try and run Windows on the minimum requirements? Ha. You're gonna need a bigger swap file to even boot and then toss in all the modal dialogs saying "You moved the mouse, are you sure you want to do that"...
Click to expand...
It is perfectly possible to run a Windows Server within the free tier of cloud providers such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft (duh). As an example, here is the info from Amazon AWS's web page:

"The AWS Free Usage Tier includes Amazon EC2 instances running Microsoft Windows Server. Customers eligible for the AWS Free Usage tier can use up to 750 hours per month of t2.micro instances running Microsoft Windows Server for free. For more information about the AWS Free Usage Tier, please visit the AWS Free Usage Tier page."
 
Back in the 80s, we ran our own modem based BBS.
The original source in Turbo Pascal was given to me, to maintain and upgrade.
After profiling the code, I rewrote all the modem controls and time-critical stuff in pure ASM for a speed boost.
We had 16550 UARTs in our BBS machines, which offer a rich environment to the ASM programmer for speed.

We were not part of FIDO, which was nationwide.
Each FIDO hub was a local call to the next hub, and so the traffic was passed.
There is a substantial cost involved with building, connecting and maintaining a "free" BBS system.
 
Crivens said:
For someone who wrote custom bootloaders in 512 Bytes (one sector) I find your statement of 8GB as being constrained pretty ridiculous
Click to expand...
I mean 500MB Ram, not 8 GB, see my post above.
Do you know someone that gives me 8 GB Ram for 1 EUR/Month and unlimited time?
And yes, also 500 MB Ram is also a lot.
 
Crivens said:
For someone who wrote custom bootloaders in 512 Bytes (one sector) I find your statement of 8GB as being constrained pretty ridiculous.
Click to expand...
There is an advantage to being "almost as old as dirt". I think a lot of people here have similar experience, writing bootloaders in limited space, being concerned with "do I have virtual memory/L2 cache enabled". I've had discussions with coworkers that were not even born when I graduated university and things they find amazing I scratch my head and say we did that back in the late 1980s.
Dec Vaxes, PDP11s, how much physical RAM, "disk storage" the size of a washing machine that measured in the 100s of megabytes. All good times.
 
bgavin said:
Back in the 80s, we ran our own modem based BBS.
The original source in Turbo Pascal was given to me, to maintain and upgrade.
After profiling the code, I rewrote all the modem controls and time-critical stuff in pure ASM for a speed boost.
We had 16550 UARTs in our BBS machines, which offer a rich environment to the ASM programmer for speed.

We were not part of FIDO, which was nationwide.
Each FIDO hub was a local call to the next hub, and so the traffic was passed.
There is a substantial cost involved with building, connecting and maintaining a "free" BBS system.
Click to expand...
I ran RBBS and eventually PC-Board in the late 80's and early 90's.
 
covacat said:
i doubt you can get 8GB ram for free (for unlimited time)
Click to expand...
You are correct! The free tier at both Amazon and Google only gives you a 1 GiB RAM machine, not 8 GiB. My fault. I got confused by the output of top, which showed 6 or 7 GiB of memory as "active", and then I rounded up.
 
Crivens said:
Ah, sweet summer children. Running Unix in 4 MB was fun. With X11!
Click to expand...
Been there, done that. My first personal Unix machine at home was in 1994, Linux on a 386-40 with 4 MiB of RAM. It worked fine. What didn't work acceptably was X11 though. My 386 didn't have an FPU (since I was doing very little scientific calculation on it), but it turns out you need an FPU in X11 to do font rendering. The problem was that finding a 40 MHz 30387 was incredibly hard: Intel didn't make them, AMD didn't either, and finding the discontinued Cyrix part took a lot of searching.

About a year later, I added a 486 that had 16 MiB, and was honestly more comfortable to do work on. The 386 was fundamentally demoted to be an XTerminal at that point. The networking technology was PLIP (using a printer cable for IP!), since I couldn't afford ethernet cards that were supported by the Linux kernel.
 
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