Meltdown BBS Utilities documentation

This documentation applies to Meltdown BBS Utilities version 1.0 alpha 4.

Overview

This package contains Meltdown BBS Utilities. It is a collection of Perl scripts designed as a companion to Meltdown BBS that allows interaction with Fidonet-compatible networks and can help automate certain file and message area maintenance tasks. These tools can be interfaced with your own scripts (batch files, etc.) in order to provide more flexibility and power to your BBS configuration.

About Meltdown BBS

Meltdown BBS is a free, open-source web-based Bulletin Board System written in PHP. For more information you may visit the project website.

This version of Meltdown BBS Utilities requires at least Meltdown BBS version 1.0 Alpha 4; it is incompatible with any earlier releases of Meltdown BBS.

Installation

Just copy the scripts in a directory of your choice. Note that this software requires Perl with the following modules installed:

Configuration

All scripts get their configuration options from the file mdutil.ini. This file includes the following sections:

[SQL]

This section defines the MySQL database options. The valid entries here are username, password, host and dbname.

Example:

[SQL]
username = sysop
password = godlike
host = localhost
dbname = bbs

[Logging]

This optional section only includes two options: log (a log file is kept if set to 1), and logfile (this is the actual path to the file).

Example:

[Logging]
log = 1
logfile = meltdown.log

[Areas]

This section applies to the Fidonet import/export scripts. The entries in this section have the following format: echotag = directory where echotag is the Fidonet echo tag of the message area, and directory is the directory where exported and imported *.MSG files are kept.

Another entry in the [Areas] section is the netmail entry - it provides a directory where the Netmail *.MSG files will be.

You must set a directory for all the Fidonet echos that you have defined in your setup of Meltdown BBS.

Example:

[Areas]
netmail = c:\bbs\netmail
ECHO1 = c:\bbs\echo1
ECHO2 = c:\bbs\echo2
ECHO3 = c:\bbs\echo3

Scripts included

export-echomail.pl

Arguments

What does it do?

Exports all new public messages from the mysql database into *.MSG areas as defined in mdutil.ini.

export-filelist.pl

Arguments

What does it do?

Exports descriptions from one file area, or from all file areas. The file list is saved in files.bbs in the file area directory as defined in your Meltdown BBS setup.

export-netmail.pl

Arguments

What does it do?

Exports all new private FTN messages from the mysql database into your Netmail *.MSG directory as defined in mdutil.ini.

export-txtfile.pl

Arguments

What does it do?

Saves all messages from a single area in a text file of your choice.

import-echomail.pl

Arguments

What does it do?

Scans all echomail *.MSG directories for incoming messages and imports them into the mysql database.

import-filelist.pl

Arguments

What does it do?

Parses the file named files.bbs in the directory of a file area (or all areas, if no file area is specified). If files are found that exist in files.bbs and physically exist in the directory, but do not exist in the mysql database, these files are imported.

import-netmail.pl

Arguments

What does it do?

Scans the netmail *.MSG directory for incoming messages and imports them into the mysql database.

import-txtfile.pl

What does it do?

Imports a text file as a message in a specified message area.

list-areas.pl

Arguments

What does it do?

Outputs a list of all file and message areas on the BBS, with their ID numbers and descriptions.

list-users.pl

Arguments

What does it do?

Outputs a detailed list of all users on the system.

History

Copyright

Meltdown BBS Utilities is © 2004 Petko Bossakov and is released under the GNU General Public license.

    This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
    it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
    the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
    (at your option) any later version.

    This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
    but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
    MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
    GNU General Public License for more details.

    You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
    along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
    Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307  USA