Had a few minutes of downtime earlier. Just finished adding another network drive as I was running out of space for my Plex server. I now have 11 terabytes of network space (4 of that is free). Should be good for another couple of years.
Going to take the BBS down again later this evening for an update to the Mystic software as well.
BBSing
* Pinned Post *
Going to pin this post (if it lets me) so that folks can more easily find the links. You can access the BBS by using your telnet client and visiting telnet://bbs.shadowscope.com or telnet://shadowscope.noip.us
If you want an EASY way to get to it from your web browser you can access it from this blog (best accessed using a desktop browser, may not display properly on mobile browsers) or by going to http://shadowscope.noip.us/
Plenty of games (200+) both locally hosted and networked. Local and networked Message areas, news groups, awesome old-school Ansi featuring Luciano Ayres artwork and MORE. With a bent toward the supernatural and horror.
BCR Game Server
Finally got around to adding BCR Game Server to the BBS tonight. Check it out on my board or hit them up directly here.
BBS Updates
I’ve gotten some more finished on the menus and prompts. Still have a ton of stuff to do and not enough time of course.
I’ve also added a few new games. If anyone know where to find it I am attempting to locate the win32 version of LORD that was in testing a few years back so that I can have a local version. You used to be able to request it from Michael Preslar but unfortunately his web site (and the file request email) is down. Don’t know if that’s permanent or not.
Also looking for someone that’s half decent (or dare I say awesome) to design a main login screen. The old green one I did that I’ve had for years needs to go.
How to Block Hackers On Synchronet
Anyone familiar with having a blog or web site can tell you that spam and getting hacked are a constant thing. Hell, I had to completely redo my web site late last year after getting hacked.
Well, apparently hacking BBSes is still a thing. For the most part all of the ip addresses associated seem to be from eastern countries, China, Korea, etc…
There are a couple of simple things you can do to cut down on the traffic and false logins and there are several reasons to do so.
First and foremost, if your router is able to block specific incoming addresses, that’s the route to take because it will cut down on traffic on your internal network. Not going to go into that here because until I load DDWRT on my router I don’t have that capability.
There are several settings in Synchronet that will help cut down on the number of folks attempting to log in.
- In the Synchronet Control Panel go to File – Properties. That will open the Control Panel Properties Window. Open the Security tab. There’s 4 options here. Delay (milliseconds) is where you can set the time between failed login attempts before a specific IP is locked out. Throttle (milliseconds) is how long to delay successive logins after a failed attempt. Hack Log Threshold is how many failed login attempts from a specific IP before it’s marked as a hack attempt. I keep this set at 3. IP Filter Threshold is how many failed attempts from a specific IP are allowed before it’s marked as a hack. That’s also set at 3 here. These options are all good if you want to automate the process. It’s still going to allow a certain number through and a small amount of network traffic but it’s damn sure better than nothing.
- You can also manually block folks as well. In the /sbbs/text directory there are a few pertinent files to look for. One I use constantly is the ip.can. It’s a list of IP addresses, wild cards accepted. Mine is currently up to 175 lines. If you use this and block top-level IPs be aware you can block prospective users as well.
- name.can is a list of user names that are blocked or not allowed to be used by new users. Sysop, user*, system*, config* are all good names to be in here.
- password and phone.can should be looked at as well.
- hosts.can is basically the same as ip.can except allowed host names. It’s not as good as ip.can as the host isn’t always reported BUT it can block multiple IPs that use the same host.
Obviously this isn’t foolproof but it’s a big help. As you can see from the picture above several have been blocked this morning. More than several actually. If you view Failed Login Attempts this will give you a list of failed logins so you don’t have to scroll through the terminal server window. Here’s a small part of the several hundred from this morning I haven’t blocked yet (although now it’s done). I try and go through this when I have time so I can add them to my ip.can
Hopefully this has been a little helpful for someone out there.
Tutorials
The BBS tutorials are back online! I managed to recover them as well as the pics that were with most of them. In addition I’ve started trying to figure out why my telnet applets aren’t working anymore. May have them fixed tonight. Or not. Lol.
Correction, I have gotten ftelnet working. Never could get flashterm working since Google has basically removed all support for it from Chrome.
Another Update on the Site
So I’ve managed to set up apache, mysql and wordpress on my machine here. I had to manually edit some of the recovered sql files and was able to import a couple thousand more lost posts and several thousand comments.
Still missing quite a bit but I think that’s all I’ll be able to recover. Ugh. Have to remember to make occasional backups from here on out. After 15 years of blogging and not being hacked I got lazy.
Anyway, the BBS is still up. Most of the links on the pages don’t work and flashterm is down until I get around to working on it but you can still access the BBS via telnet at bbs.shadowscope.com, port 23 as usual. If you already have a bbs account you can get to the web version at bbs.shadowscope.com:82
Only thing you can really do currently there is to check netmail and echomail conferences but I’ll get the ftelnet applet working again as I mentioned above.
If you are looking for mug shots on the posts I recovered from Sick Crimes, most of the posts are there but no media. Sorry about that.
Site Update
So I’ve managed to recover some (but not all) of my posts. I’ll have to set up a local site, load the database and then export the contents. Problem with that is no time to get it done anytime soon.
As far as the bbs, it’s still online and accessible. I have also managed to get most of the door games working again! Get your LORD on.
It’ll be several weeks before I am able to do much updating of any of my sites or the board due to work. This is the busiest time of the year for me and immediately following the New Year one of my store managers is on vacation so I’m tied up until mid-January at least.
The web/telnet here is offline but you can still access it at bbs.shadowscope.com
Happy New Year!
So the holidays are always a drag for me. Lots of hours and very little time for anything else. They are over now thank goodness.
As far as site updates here or my other blogs I’ve done very little other than maintenance updates, etc. A post here and there but that’s about it. Same with the BBS. The machine it’s on hosts my home automation server as well for the time being and I regularly reboot it but that’s about it. Haven’t even updated the software or anything.
The great majority of my free time has been with my family or playing Ingress (as usual)
Anyway, if you have any problems with the BBS (no, the doors still don’t work) or one of my sites, feel free to contact me. I’ll do what I can to get it fixed up.
Thanks, and hope everyone is having a great year so far.
BBS Update
The move to its own computer has finally been accomplished. I’ve gotten Shadowscope up and running on a partially dedicated laptop instead of a VM now. I say partially because it also houses my home automation software. That’s more for ease of use because I’ll be somewhat integrating the two. Nothing on the surface, mainly just so I can get mobile notifications of new users, logins, etc.
The connection may not be the fastest initially because I currently have it sitting in my living room on WiFi until I finish configuration on everything. Once I put it back on a Wired connection things should be better.
You can still access the board via telnet port 23 at bbs.shadowscope.com or click the link at the top of the page to log in from here. If you have any issues please contact me via Hangouts or through the contact link on the sidebar of this page.