I've been running Synchronet on a few variants of CentOS for a few years simply
because that is what was available to me.  I did not have an option of changing
the OS on those maines and was very determined to get everything working.

Almost did, too.  DosEMU would still require fiddling and altering of things
for some doors, but not for others.  every now and then after updating, some
part would throw coredumps or not act 'as it should', like "node rerun" would
set the status to try and re-run the bbs, but it never would.  I would have to
physically issue the command to shut it down and then start it.  ( Running from
init.d )

A few weeks back Woot.com had a deal on those little Lenevo Thinkcentre 'tiny'
desktops.  I grabbed one at just over $100 and when it arrived immediately
swapped out the hard disk for a small SSD and installed Ubuntu Desktop 18.04
LTS.

Such a smooth, straightforward setup and install.  Just follow the guide online
about pre-requisites, and the packages actually just were available and
installed!  I did not need to go hunting for SRC packages and do
configure/makes on those, everything, including DosEMU was just 'there' using
apt-get commands.  Synchronet compiled right off the bat without any odd
fiddling I've had to do in the past.  Such a fast little system compared to
what I had been using in the past. It compiled as I glanced away and I had to
do it all again because I forgot to redirect to log files and I was afraid
there were errors, it had finished so quickly.

Shut down all messaging networks for a day while I copied all related info from
the old system to the new, adjusted firewall settings and fired things up.

It sure paid off to outline everything I wanted and needed to do, and ask a few
questions before I did anything.  Much to my delighted surprise, my Dos door
games were working right out of the box without me having to tweak any configs.
 I checked on some door games that never worked right in the past, they would
hang waiting for keyboard input via syncterm or any telnet/ssh connections, but
they would work via ftelent on the web page.  To my delight they are working
without a hitch under the Ubuntu Apt packages for DosEmu.

I know there have been folks telling me to dump CentOS, but just was not able
to until I had another computer that I could put a different OS onto.  I've got
some older hardware around, but newer distros don't like this hardware as much.
 It's old old old from the 1990's.  And trying to do things with an older OS is
no fun either, especially when you need to compile the bbs.

So.. long story short ( too late, I know ), I'm a happy sysop again. No longer
is it drudgery to do things for me, but I've been spending more time on
customizing things.  It's just nice to 'tinker' with the bbs again instead of
'dealing' with it and know some things weren't working and I was likely to not
get them working. ( until now ).  

The subject line did say 'ramblings', you were warned.

cheers,

John

... Components that must not and cannot be assembled improperly will be.

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 ■ Synchronet ■ - Running madly into the wind and screaming - bbs.ujoint.org
 * Origin: Vertrauen - [vert/cvs/bbs].synchro.net (1:103/705)