Home of BusyBBS

Would it be possible to put a scheduler into busybbs? I ask because it appears a backup app was the resulting cause of forems msg bases to corrupt. It was on constant back up but I changed to to only backup at 3am. Not likely we will have callers at that time but it would be nice to set it to not take calls from say 3-3:15 to ensure altirra and backups aren’t trying to access the floppy image at the same time.

Just a thought.

BusyBBS v1.2 is a great update to an already great program. I particularly like the ability to pipe the output of the program to a logfile to keep a nice record for my already failing memory (it gets worse every day.) Thanks to John Polka for this program (and the help to implement it).

The BusyBBS installation package comes with two batch files (STARTBBS and BUSY) that we modify for use on our systems. I have added a third batch file (BEGIN seen below) to create and save the logfiles that I am creating before it runs the STARTBBS batch file. This gives me a nice logfile of BusyBBS activities.

Since it is all contained on the desktop of my PC, I create a 'bbs_logfiles' folder on the desktop to hold those logs. Then when the PC boots or I restart the BBS, I run this new BEGIN batch file. Here it is:

I added the comments ( ; ) to this file for the purposes of this post. You might want to remove them before execution. My actual batch file does not have comments in it.

Here's the copyable code: (Note that two of the lines below are wrapping in this post. Line #1 and the very last line that starts with powershell.)

@echo off
;create the backup log filename
;   DATE portion of filename
For /f "tokens=2-4 delims=/ " %%a in ('date /t') do (set mydate=%%c%%a%%b)
;   TIME portion of filename
set hour=%time:~0,2%
if "%hour:~0,1%" == " " set hour=0%hour:~1,1%
set min=%time:~3,2%
if "%min:~0,1%" == " " set min=0%min:~1,1%
set secs=%time:~6,2%
if "%secs:~0,1%" == " " set secs=0%secs:~1,1%
set mytime=%hour%%min%_%secs%

;Create 'Myfn' = the backup log filename
set myfn=%mydate%_%mytime%.txt

;set pathname 'dp' to location of bbs-log.txt (current logfile) 
set dp=c:\users\bbs\desktop

;copy (with rename) the previous logfile to the 'bbs_logfiles' folder 
copy %dp%\bbs-log.txt %dp%\bbs_logfiles\%myfn% 

;run startbbs.bat thru powershell to create the new logfile
%systemroot%\system32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe -noexit "%dp%\startbbs.bat | tee %dp%\bbs-log.txt"

Back in the DOS days of running a PC BBS, batch files were the lifeblood of these systems and I had some real monsters... one in particular called SVC (short for service) that did everything external on my systems... I wish I could find it because I have forgotten almost everything about writing batch files... but I digress...

I hope you find this useful.

Version 1.2 of busyBBS is in the works. The next version will include improved error messages and a Raspberry PI (Linux ARM) port. If anyone is interested in testing the Raspberry PI port for their BBS, let me know. After I release the Raspberry PI Port, I'll consider other ports such as Linux x64 and Mac OS/X.

-JP

'The' must-have BBS utility of the 21st century...

Just curious. What was the security update?

Thanks @amis for providing the web portal for busyBBS. If you are running busyBBS, be sure to upgrade to version 1.1. This version includes a security patch.

Okay if I upload it to DarkForce! as well? Might as well spread the love. 😀