Who's using a Raspberry Pi for their BBS?
From
Morgul@314:314/275 to
All on Tue Apr 27 17:50:48 2021
I'm curious as to who is running their BBS on a Pi,what software you're using, and what were some of the hurdles you had to work out.
So, I ran a WWIV BBS from 1992-2002 on a DOS PC. After shutting it down dur to lack of callers, I drifted away. I kept in touch with people who were still running WWIV and kind of kept abreast of what all was happening.
In early 2020, I got interested in playing with the Raspberry Pi, and my first project was a NAS media server with RAID hard drives. I fell in love with the Pi, and was REALLY enjoying being back in a command line environment again.
Then I got looking at BBSing again, talked with the current developer of WWIV, and decided to give it a shot. And here I am, back online after a 20 year hiatus.
The BBS is running WWIV 5.7.1 on a Raspberry Pi 4b 4GB ram with a 128GB USB drive. The case is an old US Robotics Courier HST Dual Standard modem case. I still have to wire up a board with the LEDs and a connector to hook in to the Pi, and I've already written a python script that will emulate the modem lights for Waiting For Call, Incoming Call, and Caller Online. If I ever get off my butt to finish it, it'll be awesome.
Biggest hurdle I had to work with was learning how to compile the binaries, and how to regularly update them. Because of the ARM technology, I couldn't just use precompiled binaries. So far it's working well.
ÄÄÄÄÄÍÍÍÍͯ Morgul! ®ÍÍÍÍÍÄÄÄÄÄ
--- WWIV 5.7.1.0001
* Origin: ** The Trading Post [SOUTH] - Columbia, SC ** (314:314/275)