Last update 06-Jun-2001

Starting and Stopping the BBS.

Now it is time to check the starting and stopping of the BBS. As you have installed everything, setup the BBS etc, you must check if the shutdown and reboot work properly. As root type shutdown -r now and watch the console. You should see messages that the BBS is closing while the systems shuts down. This should be one of the first things to happen. Because Slackware up to version 7.0.0 is tricky to automatic install the shutdown scripts, you won't see this happen on older Slackware versions. If you want, you can edit /etc/rc.d/rc.6 and /etc/rc.d/rc.K and insert the line /opt/mbse/etc/rc.shutdown at the proper places.

When your system comes up again, one of the last messages before the login prompt appears or just before X-windows starts, you should see messages that the BBS is started.

Login as user mbse and check the logfiles if everything looks good. If something is wrong, reread the previous documentation and check if you did everything right.

Next logon to your BBS locally using the account "bbs". You can do that by typing su - bbs or if you already have installed mblogin as login replacement for telnet, then type telnet localhost. You will then create the first user of your BBS, this will be you, the sysop of course. After you logout the BBS start as user mbse the program mbsetup and edit your user record to set your level to that of the sysop. One more thing, the unix account you must create when you logon as new BBS user may not be mbse as this is the normal Admin account the BBS and its utilities use.

Now login with your unix account and see if everything still works. If you have setup mgetty you may want to test if users really can login with a modem. Also check a mailer session, can you dialout, ie. poll other nodes and can they call you. There is a lot that can go wrong with unix permissions if you are not precise in wat you are doing.

If everything is working it is time to create poll events, and adjust other scripts to your local needs to get your BBS full up and running.

To do this you must install a crontab for user mbse. As user mbse go to the directory ~/mbsebbs-0.33.xx. In that directory type sh ./CRON.sh and a default crontab will be installed.

To add poll events, edit the crontab with the command crontab -e At the bottom of that file there is an example of how to do that. Now that the crontab is installed, all maintenance will now work, automatic dialout, scanning and tossing mail etc. In other words, the bbs is up and running.

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