I will be moving Black Flag and all my BBS's
to the cloud in the next few days. Will be better this way
I'll keep you posted mates.
Cheers - Hawk

|07 |01� |14H|12a|04wk|07 |04Hubba|12r|14d
|01��������������Ŀ
|14 |01 |08+o |14B|12l|04ack Fl|12a|14g |01�

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 2022/07/11 (Windows/32)
* Origin: Black Flag <ACiD Telnet HQ> blackflagbbs.com (21:1/112)

On 07 Dec 2022, Hawk said the following...

I will be moving Black Flag and all my BBS's
to the cloud in the next few days. Will be better this way
I'll keep you posted mates.
Cheers - Hawk

Not a bad plan. I keep hearing about Linode.

... Error, no Keyboard - Press F1 to Continue.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 2022/07/15 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Clutch BBS * telnet://bbs.clutchbbs.com (21:1/199)

Re: Moving my boards to the cloud
By: Hawk to All on Wed Dec 07 2022 01:48 pm

I will be moving Black Flag and all my BBS's
to the cloud in the next few days. Will be better this way

I'm curious what made you decide to do that? I do think there are some benefits from running a BBS in a cloud service, but there are some drawbacks as well (they charge a hosting fee, and you have less control over the hardware etc.).

A while ago, I calculated the cost of the electricity usage of my BBS PC at home and it's very little. Also, I have total control of my BBS PC at home, and I run some other servers on it as well (including Plex Media Server).

Nightfox
--- SBBSecho 3.15-Linux
* Origin: Digital Distortion: digdist.synchro.net (21:1/137)

I'm curious what made you decide to do that? I do think there are some

The reasons I decided to do it is not having to worry about hardware (housing it somewhere, powering it, maintaining it). Then there is the security that the server is no where on my personal network at home at all. The uptime is more secure. As I am protected again power outages and ISP outages which happen more often then from a data center. Additionally, my entire server image is backed up daily without me having to do anything. So easy to recover if something was to happen to the server.

These are my reasons anyway.


Insomnia City BBS SysOp
Kalamazoo, MI USA
bbs.farcasternet.org Telnet 23, SSH 2222

... Unzip... expand... What kind of pervert came up with this?

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/24 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Insomnia City BBS - Kalamazoo, MI (21:1/156)

Re: Re: Moving my boards to the cloud
By: Mandarax to Nightfox on Wed Dec 07 2022 03:25 pm

I'm curious what made you decide to do that? I do think there are
some

The reasons I decided to do it is not having to worry about hardware (housing it somewhere, powering it, maintaining it). Then there is the security that the server is no where on my personal network at home at all. The uptime is more secure. As I am protected again power outages and ISP outages which happen more often then from a data center. Additionally, my entire server image is backed up daily without me having to do anything. So easy to recover if something was to happen to the server.

There are definitely some benefits there.

I wonder how they do their daily backups? I imagine it would be best to power down the machine to do the backup (which means some downtime daily). Also, if backups are daily, what if they do a backup when it's in a bad state? Normally, backups should be in a good working configuration so that if something goes wrong, you know you can always revert back to a good working backup.

Nightfox
--- SBBSecho 3.15-Linux
* Origin: Digital Distortion: digdist.synchro.net (21:1/137)

I wonder how they do their daily backups? I imagine it would be best to power down the machine to do the backup (which means some downtime
daily). Also, if backups are daily, what if they do a backup when it's
in a bad state? Normally, backups should be in a good working

The backups are complete image of the server. It saves more than 1 backup. So to have all the backup all fail and be bad would not be likely. There is no server downtime. My linux server has been up and running without reboot or shutown for 8 months right now.


Insomnia City BBS SysOp
Kalamazoo, MI USA
bbs.farcasternet.org Telnet 23, SSH 2222

... Honk if you love peace and quiet!

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/24 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Insomnia City BBS - Kalamazoo, MI (21:1/156)

On 07 Dec 2022 at 12:38p, Nightfox pondered and said...

The reasons I decided to do it is not having to worry about hardware (housing it somewhere, powering it, maintaining it). Then there is th security that the server is no where on my personal network at home a all. The uptime is more secure. As I am protected again power outages ISP outages which happen more often then from a data center. Addition my entire server image is backed up daily without me having to do anything. So easy to recover if something was to happen to the server

There are definitely some benefits there.

I wonder how they do their daily backups? I imagine it would be best to power down the machine to do the backup (which means some downtime
daily). Also, if backups are daily, what if they do a backup when it's
in a bad state? Normally, backups should be in a good working configuration so that if something goes wrong, you know you can always revert back to a good working backup.

Since the system is virtualized, you basically snapshot it
by marking its storage device copy-on-write and stream the
image somewhere. Assuming the guest OS has a working
filesystem that doesn't commit an unrecoverable state to
secondary store, you _should_ be able to bring the system
back online with a self-consistent filesystem; whether you
lose data or not is a different matter, which kind of
addresses the second part: roll to an earlier snapshot if
the one you try to recover to is bad.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/24 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

Since the system is virtualized, you basically snapshot it
by marking its storage device copy-on-write and stream the
image somewhere. Assuming the guest OS has a working
filesystem that doesn't commit an unrecoverable state to
secondary store, you _should_ be able to bring the system
back online with a self-consistent filesystem; whether you
lose data or not is a different matter, which kind of
addresses the second part: roll to an earlier snapshot if
the one you try to recover to is bad.

Who are you guys hosting your bbs with?

... Error 3032 - Recursion error. See error 3032.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 2022/07/15 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Clutch BBS * telnet://bbs.clutchbbs.com (21:1/199)

Who are you guys hosting your bbs with?

I used to use vultr for my BBS, but have since moved it to a PC at home. I still use vultr for talismanbbs.com.

In the past I've used digital ocean, and even longer ago linode. I prefer
vultr as they allowed customers to install from an uploaded iso (as well
as the default list of OSes). Digital Ocean is about the same price wise, though I think linode was a bit more expensive last time i checked.

If you want windows it's extra because of the license fee and
requirements, but vultr starts at $5US a month (actually $2.50 a month
but you only get ipv6 address) $5US gives you 20Gb SSD, 1Gb of ram and 1
core. Which is more than enough to run a BBS on.

Also you pay by the minute (I think, possibly seconds) so at the end of a
month you get a bill for $5 if you use it the whole month, if you only
use it for part, you only pay for what you used. (I think that's fairly standard for VPS providers though).

Hope that helps.

Andrew


--- Talisman v0.46-dev (Windows/x64)
* Origin: Smuggler's Cove - Private BBS (21:1/182)

On 08 Dec 2022, apam said the following...

Who are you guys hosting your bbs with?

I used to use vultr for my BBS, but have since moved it to a PC at home.
I still use vultr for talismanbbs.com.

In the past I've used digital ocean, and even longer ago linode. I prefer vultr as they allowed customers to install from an uploaded iso (as well as the default list of OSes). Digital Ocean is about the same price wise, though I think linode was a bit more expensive last time i checked.

If you want windows it's extra because of the license fee and requirements, but vultr starts at $5US a month (actually $2.50 a month
but you only get ipv6 address) $5US gives you 20Gb SSD, 1Gb of ram and 1 core. Which is more than enough to run a BBS on.

Also you pay by the minute (I think, possibly seconds) so at the end of a month you get a bill for $5 if you use it the whole month, if you only
use it for part, you only pay for what you used. (I think that's fairly standard for VPS providers though).

Hope that helps.

Have you seen prices less then $5 a month? and more ?

... Do vegetarians eat animal crackers?

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 2022/07/15 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Clutch BBS * telnet://bbs.clutchbbs.com (21:1/199)

Have you seen prices less then $5 a month? and more ?

My server costs me much more than that. However, I have a server that is probably more server than just a simple BBS would need. I have dedicated 4 cores, 8gb RAM, 250gb SSD storage, snapshot backups. They also allow me to request to edit the reverse IP for my IP address so it matches my domain name settings for sending email out. If you want to be able to send emails out from a self hosted email server, you need to make sure not to get a VPS provider that has IP's blocked by gmail, hotmail, etc. This can happen often to some of the big guys because of people using them to run spam. I get almost instant support response when I need things looked into as well, 24 hours a day.


Insomnia City BBS SysOp
Kalamazoo, MI USA
bbs.farcasternet.org Telnet 23, SSH 2222

... Consultant: A person who makes good on a salesman's promises!

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/24 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Insomnia City BBS - Kalamazoo, MI (21:1/156)

Have you seen prices less then $5 a month? and more ?

Yes, you choose the size of your instance, and it varies in price
depending on the size.

If you mean less that $5 a month for a 1Gb VPS, no I haven't.

Andrew


--- Talisman v0.46-dev (Windows/x64)
* Origin: Smuggler's Cove - Private BBS (21:1/182)

Who are you guys hosting your bbs with?

I've used DigitalOcean for all manner of things and that's where my BBS stuff lives as well. They aren't the cheapest but they're excellent.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 2022/07/11 (Linux/64)
* Origin: m O N T E R E Y b B S . c O M (21:4/173)

In the past I've used digital ocean, and even longer ago linode. I prefer vultr as they allowed customers to install from an uploaded iso (as well as the default list of OSes). Digital Ocean is about the same price wise, though I think linode was a bit more expensive last time i checked.

DO allows you to use the OS of your choosing but it takes some work...you have to build a droplet, power it down, put it in recovery mode, and then point to different install media. For most of my needs, this is not necessary. However I do have a 32 bit Windows 7 droplet which I basically built from scratch, and this is where I host all my DOS doors and things of that nature. It works very well.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 2022/07/11 (Linux/64)
* Origin: m O N T E R E Y b B S . c O M (21:4/173)

On 08 Dec 2022, esc said the following...

Who are you guys hosting your bbs with?

I've used DigitalOcean for all manner of things and that's where my BBS stuff lives as well. They aren't the cheapest but they're excellent.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 2022/07/11 (Linux/64)
* Origin: m O N T E R E Y b B S . c O M (21:4/173)

Thanns.

I will check them out again.

... Live every day as though it were your last. One day, you'll be right

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 2022/07/15 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Clutch BBS * telnet://bbs.clutchbbs.com (21:1/199)

Hawk wrote to All <=-

I will be moving Black Flag and all my BBS's
to the cloud in the next few days. Will be better this way
I'll keep you posted mates.

Whose cloud are you going to? Would love to hear how it goes!


... Abandon desire
--- MultiMail/DOS v0.52
* Origin: realitycheckBBS.org -- information is power. (21:4/122)

Re: Moving my boards to the cloud
By: Hawk to All on Wed Dec 07 2022 01:48 pm

I will be moving Black Flag and all my BBS's
to the cloud in the next few days. Will be better this way
I'll keep you posted mates.
Cheers - Hawk

Which cloud provider? And are you using Linux or Windows?

How much are you paying per month?

I've experimented with several cloud providers, both Windows and Ubuntu. I may move my boards to Vultr eventually.

*** Diamond Dave ***
--- SBBSecho 3.14-Win32
* Origin: Diamond Mine Online BBS 21:1/194 bbs.dmine.net:24 (21:1/194)

Hi apam,

Have you seen prices less then $5 a month? and more ?

Yes, you choose the size of your instance, and it varies in price
depending on the size.

If you mean less that $5 a month for a 1Gb VPS, no I haven't.

check out binary lane... They have some great deals and the VM's are
fast, along with the connection speed. Plus easy to manage. Choice of
OS's, along with BYO. Locations in SYD/MEL/BNE/PTH.

1 IPv4, and a subnet for IPv6.

1CPU, 1Gb Ram, 20GB HD space, 1TB Data (Charged for data sent, not
received). is $4.13 per month.

https://www.binarylane.com.au



\/orlon
aka
Stephen


--- Talisman v0.46-dev (Linux/m68k)
* Origin: Vorlon Empire: Amiga 3000 powered in Sector 550 (21:1/195.1)

On 08 Dec 2022 at 11:26a, apam pondered and said...

I used to use vultr for my BBS, but have since moved it to a PC at home.
I still use vultr for talismanbbs.com.

Lordy I am old school... they are all running on assorted whirring boxes upstairs here :)

Kerr Avon [Blake's 7] 'I'm not expendable, I'm not stupid and I'm not going' avon[at]bbs.nz | bbs.nz | fsxnet.nz

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/24 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

Have you seen prices less then $5 a month? and more ?

$3.50 for a Vultr instance in a New Jersey data center. 10Gb - single core,
and I believe 2 Gb data / month. IP4 no IP6


.:[ Exit stage left ]:.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A45 2020/02/18 (Linux/64)
* Origin: The Bottomless Abyss BBS * bbs.bottomlessabyss.net (21:1/172)

Who are you guys hosting your bbs with?

I am using Bahnhof (a Swedish provider) for all my boards, stable, secure and everything i need. The only drawback is that there is no 32bit system :(

... I am NOT a tagline THIEF. I am a tagline CONSERVATIONIST.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/25 (Windows/64)
* Origin: SLiME CiTY BBS (21:1/160)

Who are you guys hosting your bbs with?

I've used DigitalOcean for all manner of things and that's where my BBS st lives as well. They aren't the cheapest but they're excellent.

I second this, all my dockers, websites for clients are hosted at Digital Ocean.

oP!

... Operator, give me the number for 911

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/24 (Linux/64)
* Origin: TheForze - bbs.theforze.eu:23 (21:3/126)

In the past I've used digital ocean, and even longer ago linode. I prefer vultr as they allowed customers to install from an uploaded iso (as well

This is why Vultr has been my goto also. It's one of the few providers where I can use OpenBSD for my mail server.

... Reward for a job well done: More work

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 2022/07/15 (Raspberry Pi/32)
* Origin: CaNerDUH BBS (21:4/151)

I second this, all my dockers, websites for clients are hosted at Digital Ocean.

I've even got my 32 bit Windows 7 doorgame server running in digitalocean. It took some persistence to get it to work but I'm glad I did hehe.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 2022/07/11 (Linux/64)
* Origin: m O N T E R E Y b B S . c O M (21:4/173)

All of my stuff is hosted on the cloud. I see no reason to host my own hardware.

All Linux.

On 04:07 11/12 , opicron wrote:

Who are you guys hosting your bbs with?

I've used DigitalOcean for all manner of things and that's where my BBS st
lives as well. They aren't the cheapest but they're excellent.

I second this, all my dockers, websites for clients are hosted at Digital Ocean.

oP!

.... Operator, give me the number for 911

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/24 (Linux/64)
* Origin: TheForze - bbs.theforze.eu:23 (21:3/126)

--
yrNews Usenet Reader for iOS
http://appstore.com/yrNewsUsenetReader
--- SBBSecho 3.15-Linux
* Origin: The ByteXchange BBS | bbs.thebytexchange.com (21:1/107)

On 12/7/22 11:48, Hawk wrote:

I will be moving Black Flag and all my BBS's
to the cloud in the next few days. Will be better this way
I'll keep you posted mates.

Just curious, where are you running the BBS? I've been on DigitalOcean
for a few years at this point.

Aside: Thinking about getting a dedicated box somewhere (Phoenix NAP),
to run a dedicated mail server somewhere... the software I want to run (wildduck) uses a few databases (redis/mongo) and wanting a bit more
oomph so that it runs well as a starting point. Basically wanting 6-8
cores and 32gb ram, but not costing an arm and a leg (~$80-100/mo).

Also been playing with Cloudflare, to setup a custom web based bbs...
Workers + DurableObjects + D1 (SQlite) + R2 (file and message data
storage). I've also spent a little time on getting an API running
against SynchroNet, but the more I do, the more I'm wanting to just
write my own.
--
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1@roughneckbbs.com
--- SBBSecho 3.15-Linux
* Origin: Roughneck BBS - roughneckbbs.com (21:3/149)

Just curious, where are you running the BBS? I've been on DigitalOcean for a few years at this point.

I have my stuff, not the bbs though, running offshore in the netherlands. AbeloHost is the site. they are affordable. Plus you dont have the censorship of big tech breathing down your neck.

|11�|03-|09�|01ķ |15K|07�|08dd |01���|09�-|03� |11�
|01� |15W|07�ck|08ed |01�

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A45 2020/02/18 (Windows/32)
* Origin: Sinner's Haven 2.0 (21:1/169)

On 12/7/22 19:19, niter3 wrote:

On 08 Dec 2022, apam said the following...

Who are you guys hosting your bbs with?

I used to use vultr for my BBS, but have since moved it to a PC at home.
I still use vultr for talismanbbs.com.

In the past I've used digital ocean, and even longer ago linode. I prefer
vultr ...

Have you seen prices less then $5 a month? and more ?

I haven't seen pricing under $5/mo that I'd trust myself. I'm using DigitalOcean on Intel 4GB ram droplet with backup service... I also have
a $5 droplet running Caddy as a reverse proxy for my BBS and a few other things... a bit of an odd config, but didn't feel like messing with Synchronet's let's encrypt integration.

On the VPS, I'm running the BBS containerized (docker) ... and can rsync
the bbs data files down for backup. Not including DNS changes, I can
have the BBS completely moved in about 15m from creation of the VPS this
way.

I'm also using SendGrid for email delivery... I had trouble getting off
of a couple of block lists (one of MS's 3 services had issue) since it's
a "cloud" host. Have been thinking about setting up a mail server on
Hetzner or PhoenixNAP and dropping sendgrid.
--
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1@roughneckbbs.com
--- SBBSecho 3.15-Linux
* Origin: Roughneck BBS - roughneckbbs.com (21:3/149)

On 12/8/22 02:54, esc wrote:

ni> Who are you guys hosting your bbs with?

I've used DigitalOcean for all manner of things and that's where my
BBS stuff lives as well. They aren't the cheapest but they're
excellent.

Agreed, been using them for years myself, have also used Linode and a
few others... but DO pricing has been decent (despite the increases a
few months ago) and better than the bigger cloud options. With enough features to automate and make it all useful without being so big it gets
in your way.
--
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1@roughneckbbs.com
--- SBBSecho 3.15-Linux
* Origin: Roughneck BBS - roughneckbbs.com (21:3/149)

On 12/31/22 07:01, Kidd Wicked wrote:

Tr> Just curious, where are you running the BBS? I've been on DigitalOcean
Tr> for a few years at this point.

I have my stuff, not the bbs though, running offshore in the netherlands. AbeloHost is the site. they are affordable. Plus you dont have the censorship of big tech breathing down your neck.

That's cool, have thought about similarly, but not sure about the
latency to western us.
--
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1@roughneckbbs.com
--- SBBSecho 3.15-Linux
* Origin: Roughneck BBS - roughneckbbs.com (21:3/149)

On 03 Jan 2023, Tracker1 said the following...

That's cool, have thought about similarly, but not sure about the
latency to western us.

I am pinging the servers from florida at 150ms. I have 13k users from the usa on the site and haven't had any lagging complaints. But it is not a BBS and is a social media platform.

|11�|03-|09�|01ķ |15K|07�|08dd |01���|09�-|03� |11�
|01� |15W|07�ck|08ed |01�

... Running Windows is better than washing them!

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Windows/32)
* Origin: Sinner's Haven 2.0 (21:1/169)

Tracker1 wrote to Hawk <=-

Aside: Thinking about getting a dedicated box somewhere (Phoenix NAP),
to run a dedicated mail server somewhere...

I spent my day off yesterday tinkering with spf and dmarc for my
domain; it appears that Google is marking BBS mails as spam. I relay
outbound email through dreamhost, I may need to figure out a way to
relay through Google instead.




... "The swift blade penetrates the salad."
--- MultiMail/Win v0.52
* Origin: realitycheckBBS.org -- information is power. (21:4/122)

I will be moving Black Flag and all my BBS's
to the cloud in the next few days. Will be better this way

I'm curious what made you decide to do that? I do think there are some

Resurrecting this discussion because I wanted to talk about my own BBS.

I was living at places where I controlled the router, and was running my BBS from an old computer.

Then I moved to Germany, and tried to get my brother to keep my computer on and poke a hole in the network to allow telnet access to that one computer.

He had no interest in that. So I no longer had a BBS that was accessible, and didn't have reasonable hardware (or interest in doing the work of negotiating with others to get a router setup so I could run the BBS) with me in Germany, as I moved with what I could bring in a few bags.

So, cloud it was, and a move to Linux. Took me a couple months to accept that I couldn't use the old computer any more, and to get everything set up again.

But at this point, I prefer it. It's a virtual machine, and the hardware and setup is more controllable than it would be if I just had the machine running at my brother's place.

And, now, I _could_ set up a dedicated computer here, but aside from some sysop functions/ability to see some things in action locally, the benefits are greater having it located in a server environment rather than trying to make a server environment at home.

But another place, another time, if I owned my own home and expected to stay there for 20+ years, etc.? Yeah, probably different decisions.

And I use Vultr. It's not too expensive. Though I might go more expensive on things if/when I move more internet stuff to their servers from other places / in my head.

Anyway, I like some of the nostalgia aspect of things, so I'm all for people running BBSs at home on their own hardware. I'm still kinda tempted to try and get old BBS software running, but the amount of things that new BBS packages make easier means that I'm probably more likely to explore Synchronet, Enigma 1/2, or apam's projects than I am to try and make something old work.

But still nifty when other people head down that path. Kinda like making a Model T run. People don't do it because they want a car.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/24 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Storm BBS (21:2/108)

matches my domain name settings for sending email out. If you want to be able to send emails out from a self hosted email server, you need to
make sure not to get a VPS provider that has IP's blocked by gmail, hotmail, etc. This can happen often to some of the big guys because of

I wound up going with mxroute.com for e-mail. They currently have a $200 lifetime deal, though I subscribed with a $60/2 years plan.

I figure having a provider that just provides e-mail should make them well-focused on providing e-mail. They have limits of no more than 300 e-mails per hour, so hopefully that means that the spammers stay away, and they can avoid being blacklisted.

I do occasionally have issues with my e-mails winding up in spam boxes, but that's because of a) sometimes using odd domain names, like .rocks, and b) using Eudora. Evidently something about using antique software makes providers trust it less.

But neither of those are provider issues.

On the other hand, I haven't even tried to set up e-mail from my BBS or other things that are hosted on other servers. Just personal e-mail, or e-mail for people I do the hosting for.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/24 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Storm BBS (21:2/108)

Tracker1 wrote to Hawk <=-

Aside: Thinking about getting a dedicated box somewhere (Phoenix
NAP), to run a dedicated mail server somewhere...

I spent my day off yesterday tinkering with spf and dmarc for my
domain; it appears that Google is marking BBS mails as spam. I relay outbound email through dreamhost, I may need to figure out a way to
relay through Google instead.

Not sure if I already replied to this... Been using SendGrid to relay the BBS through, which I haven't had any delivery issues with.

For my current mail server, other than the bbs, also relaying.. about the only service I had issue with is the outlook.com service (which is separate from o365 and hotmail) and been impossible to clear. Part of why I've been thinking of going to something other than the cloud providers.


--
Michael J. Ryan
+o roughneckbbs.com
tracker1@roughneckbbs.com
--- SBBSecho 3.15-Linux
* Origin: Roughneck BBS - roughneckbbs.com (21:3/149)