09 Dec 16 20:46, you wrote to me:

 PH>>> Thanks Mark!
 PH>>> Appreciate your help 

 ml>> you're welcome...

 PH> That's the thing I really like about our wider community we're all
 PH> fundamentally helpful guys that have (I think) a similar desire to
 PH> tinker and assist - so again, thanks my good man 

yup... as long as politics, religion, or money are involved, we do all seem to
get along pretty well :lol:

 PH>>> Paul's / Michael's suggestions) but I am holding on to this file!
 PH>>> It's like gold dust around these parts!

 ml>> i originally wrote to ask paulQ to send you a copy of his and then i
 ml>> remembered that i should have one on my FMail/TimEd point which i did
 ml>> so heck, i just sent it over rather than you having to dance the
 ml>> dance you were fixing to get started in... feel free to share it
 ml>> where ever it is needed... it is only 400 null characters... if you
 ml>> weren't on winwhatever, we could have been over and done in a minute
 ml>> with dd 

 PH> Well I have been moving in the direction of Linux stuff for quite some
 PH> time now, and although I am still running a lot of stuff on windows I
 PH> do have my low power fm radio station powered by an Ubuntu box. I also
 PH> set up the Usenet NNTP server using Debian, and the latest additions
 PH> to the home are raspbian powered Raspberry Pi's 

slowly but surely you are leaving the nest and joining the ranks of the truly
free ones :lol:

 PH> So perhaps in time I could be considered to have come across from the
 PH> dark side!

nah... i can't call it the dark side... there's so much more light around and
it is easier to see what's going on, really...


FWIW: the way to create that file with dd?

  dd if=/dev/zero of=lastread.bbs count=1 bs=400

this creates a file one block in size with a block size of 400 bytes... we're
reading from /dev/zero which outputs null characters... we only need null
characters at this point because the first user, generally the sysop, has read
no messages in any of the HMB areas... technically speaking, lastread.bbs is
made of X number of blocks of 200 records... these records are one word in
size... a word is an unsigned 16bit integer... its maximum value is 65535 which
 is (2^16)-1 (two to the 16th power minus one)... in hex that's $FFFF in pascal
 notation or 0xFFFF in C notation...

how does lastread.bbs work? well, we start it off with one block of records for
 the first user record in the users.bbs file... as noted above, this block has
the internal structure of 200 records, one record for each HMB area... space
for all 200 possible areas is always allocated... so for just the first user,
there's one 400 byte file... add a second user and the file is now 2 x 200
records (2 x 400 bytes)... add a third user and you have three user records of
200 words each which is 1200 bytes total... previously i showed my HMB files
and my lastread.bbs was 422400 bytes in size... dividing that by 400 gives me
1056 user records which coorsponds to the actual number of user accounts on my
BBS... yes, this file is relationally linked to the users.bbs file... the
relationship is based on the users.bbs record numbers... the physical record
number, not one stored in the file like some BBSes do... enough of that,
though...

NOTE: if you need a file of some size, dd is the way to go... while testing the
 above, i tried one without the "count" and had to CTRL-C out of it... this was
 only a couple of seconds and it had already created a file that was some 4Meg
in size... you can also create a file with random data in it by reading from
/dev/urandom... as its name indicates, it is purely random bytes... someone
might suggest to use /dev/random but it will eventually block (stop outputting
data) unless your system is busy... random data is generated by system
activity...

)\/(ark

Always Mount a Scratch Monkey
Do you manage your own servers? If you are not running an IDS/IPS yer doin' it
wrong...
... All you can really do is pop a Valium.
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