Eagles BBS

It all started as a port of Pirates Bulletin Board System (PBBS) version 1.6 to ESIX/System V. Pirates BBS was written by Ed Luke at Mississippi State University in the summer of 1989, and earned its place in Internet legend through the now-defunct Mars Hotel BBS. Two friends from high school, then students at the University of Southern Mississippi (which is my alma mater as well), generated enough interest in an Internet BBS to get space on a machine in the Computer Science Department. Together we ported Pirates, which was strictly BSD code at the time, to ESIX. The Eagle's Nest BBS was born April 14, 1992.

It wasn't easy or pretty, as any early user of the Eagle's Nest will tell you, but it eventually worked. Along the way I added a lot of features from other BBSes that Pirates 1.6 didn't have, brought in things from later Pirates revisions, and even had a few original ideas. It wasn't meant to be anything but a simple PBBS port, but people started taking an interest in our “enhanced Pirates”, so we gave it our own name—Eagles BBS—in honor of the Eagle's Nest, and of our school's mascot from which that name is derived.

We released Eagles BBS 1.0 in August 1992, and I've updated it four times since then. My partners have since dropped out of the project. Thanks to a lot of gracious folks across the Net, I received ports of it to quite a few other operating systems. None of these received more than casual attention, until we discovered Linux. Before I get into that, I should give a little technical information about the software itself.

Eagles BBS is a self-contained, multifunction bulletin board package that is accessed by logging in to a special account, either through telnet, dial-in, or a terminal. Three executables comprise the EBBS system: bbsrf, bbs, and bbs.chatd.

bbsrf is a special setuid root login shell. A user “bbs” is placed in /etc/passwd with bbsrf as its login shell. bbsrf optionally erases the login from /etc/utmp, making it invisible to the “finger” and “who” commands. It then does a chroot to the bbs home directory, does a setuid back to “bbs”, and execs the bbs program.

The chroot is done for security purposes. With it, anyone who might break out of the bbs program into a shell will only have access to the bbs home directory, not the rest of the host system. Because of the chroot, the BBS is completely self-contained underneath the bbs account's home directory, except for the record in /etc/passwd. All files needed by the BBS at run time are copied under ~bbs; for example the /etc/termcap file is copied to ~bbs/etc, the shared C library is copied to ~bbs/lib, and so on. This is a major portability headache. More on this later.

The bbs program does most of the work. First it prompts the user for a userid and password, which are validated by a lookup in the ~bbs/.PASSWDS file. This is much like how the standard system login program works, except ~bbs/.PASSWDS is a binary file. Once logged in, the user navigates through a series of menus accessing the features of the BBS.

The menu system is full-screen, and uses the terminal capability database (~bbs/etc/termcap) for efficient manipulation of the terminal. EBBS does not use

libcurses but a stripped-down, simplified curses look-alike dating from the Pirates days. Because the user is usually coming in through telnet, the BBS cannot always tell what terminal type the user has; there is a menu option for the user to specify this, however. The menu system is hierarchical; from the top level Main Menu one can access submenus, such as the Talk Menu, Xyz Menu, File Menu, and Mail Menu. The functions available from the menus can be roughly divided into seven categories, which I'll briefly describe:

As you can see, EBBS, like its Pirates predecessor, stands on its own for the most part—hooks to other services are few and far between. Much of this is necessary because of the chroot. Some sites have integrated Internet Relay Chat clients into their BBSes, but even then the built-in chat system is quite popular. EBBS seems to be popular among computing neophytes because of the simple menu system and builtin editor. On the same token, power users sometimes get frustrated by its limitations.

The isolated nature of a PBBS or EBBS system encourages some interesting relationships among its regular users, especially after a system has been around for a while. Some of the things that go on would surprise even the most ardent soap opera fan! I'll leave that topic open for another article, though.