[Coco] DriveWire 4 beta

[William Schaub]

Aaron Wolfe wrote:
> On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 7:24 PM, William Schaub <wschaub at steubentech.com> wrote:
>   
> *SNIP*
>   
>> I even used that supercomm program to make a few posts on a telnet BBS I've
>> joined recently (The Holodeck).
>>
>> Now that I have a way to use os9 from telnet and actually be able to read
>> the screen. (I used an apple composite monitor up till this point) I would
>> like to see if I can make UUCPbb work.
>>
>>     
>
> Let me know if you want any help with that, I'm interested in UUCPbb
> myself.  Are there still UUCP networks running?  Maybe we should setup
> our own, running entirely on CoCos :)
>
>   
Yes I would like some help with this. I'm a total OS9 newbie. but I 
would like to be able to do full screen editing in OS9 and learn enough 
to set up a development environment to program in C using the C compiler 
for OS9.

If you know anything about UUCPbb that would be helpful too.

UUCP is still used in places in the world that have unreliable or 
non-existent infrastructure and also for things like satellite links to 
ships and oil rigs and things like that.

the reason I want to mess with UUCPbb is a project I'm working on is 
somewhat related (http://teotwawki.steubentech.com)

What my software does is take a Usenet server (INN) and propagate news 
over an ad-hoc or meshed wireless network and also by doing USB drive 
swaps.  Instead of having a statically configured network like is common 
with usenet everything is dynamic and swapping of articles happens as 
soon as either USB drive insertion or a machine running the software 
comes into wireless range.  the wireless bit is a lot more interesting. 
basically a broadcast packet is sent out as a beacon advertising that 
the service exists on that IP and what services are being exported (only 
news is supported at this time)

A mapper daemon running on each machine running the software then 
receives these packets and builds a map of all currently known 
teotwawkinet nodes. this map has two time stamps for each node: the last 
time we saw a broadcast packet from them, and the last time we 
successfully synced news with them.

that second timestamp is always zero when the node is first added to the 
map.

at a pre-determined and tunable interval the mapper daemon goes through 
the entire map and calls a script that batches news articles up to send 
to all of the nodes it knows about. this script takes the node name  and 
its timestamp as arguments.

It then will read the news server's history file and look for articles 
that have been added to the news spool after the timestamp given to it. 
(or the whole news spool if timestamp is zero) the article IDs it finds 
are passed to innxmit with the IP of the nodename found in the map
 and it does a streaming NNTP connection to that node.  Due to how 
usenet works any duplicate articles are quickly rejected if that 
machines has seen them before. (I also have provisions for adding 
previously unseen newsgroups automagicly)

If the batcher script does not find articles in the spool newer than the 
timestamp then an NNTP connection is not attempted at all.

the IP connection is maintained (on ad-hoc networks anyway) by 
avahi-autoipd. and no nameservice is assumed other than
the dynamically assembled map on each machine running the software.

if a broadcast packet is not seen within a tunable length of time it is 
deleted from the map (assumed it was turned off or went out of wireless 
range)

in this way you can have a distributed discussion forum without the need 
of a centralized server or user database and no infrastructure other 
than what you carry with you. you can also travel different places or 
people can travel to your area and as soon as your machines detect each 
other you have updates to the discussion straight away and the network 
propagates in much the same way that the common cold does.  The idea is 
based loosely on the information without borders sneakernet project. 
particularly the gossip concept. When people meet they tend to gossip 
and share the news with each other, well this is pretty much the same 
thing except in my case I'm doing net news instead of email and its not 
encrypted.

I wish sneakernet had took off it seems to be abandoned and their wiki 
is totally vandalized by spammers now...
so looks like I can't give you a link anymore. (nothing pisses me off 
more than seeing things like that happen...)

UUCP comes in for when you want to reach a wider area or pull in 
messages more reliably from another region etc.
you can use the internet as well but in some places a plain old 
telephone network is likely the best option you have.

Since I'm looking at this from a perspective that I want people to be 
able to use whatever hardware is available to them
I'm just curious to see how well the coco would work as a small news 
server over UUCP. not that anyone would likely use it
mind you but it would be a bit of fun. but it would be cool to have a 
few coco BBSes networked with UUCP over IP as well.