Subj : Downlinks and points
To : Oli
From : Al
Date : Fri Jan 15 2021 06:42 am
Re: Downlinks and points
By: Oli to deon on Fri Jan 15 2021 01:16 pm
Ol> Every decent tosser should be good enough for hub stuff, AFAIK hpt was not
Ol> very common in the 90s when Fidonet was way bigger. I never had a hub
Ol> (only a node with points), so I don't know exactly what features I would
Ol> miss that hpt provides and other tossers don't.
It should. It's too bad that FE can't get a small update so it wouldn't always strip seen bys when tossing to an out of zone link.
Back when FE was last released that is exactly what we wanted/needed but today it is exactly what we don't want/need. I used FE back then, wonderful tosser.
FMail is also on my hit list but it doesn't currently include a linux native setup and I don't think I can run wine on my BBS machine, there is no xorg installed there.
Ol> I thought also of nodes that aren't a hub and don't use 95% of hpt
Ol> features. hpt makes Fidonet much more complicated than it is. A steep
Ol> learning curve and complexity also means that it's harder to remember all
Ol> the config parameters and is easier to shoot yourself in the foot.
Actually hpt is not much harder to setup that squish. I used squish also years ago. It is a favorite. It's hard to get started but once you get going it starts to become logical.
I started using husky late in the 90's and was looking for software I could use on linux and that was a strong point. In those days there was little support for linux in the world of FTN software. Back then the husky project was started by a group of people in your part of the world. There was a large group of solid programmers and hackers supporting the project and they are the ones who originally brought the husky project to life. I love those guys!
Today the project seems to be comprised mostly of russian nodes who are doing their best to keep the project workable.
Ol> I stopped considering hpt when I realized that it doesn't even have basic
Ol> 5D support and 3D/4D had weird side effects with binkd on my system (which
Ol> some experienced too, but many cannot reproduce).
If you haven't already you should bring that up with the husky project. Software development is never a done deal and we have to keep on it or it falls into a state of disrepair. Sometimes those discussions are not quick and easy but we need to have those discussions.
Ol> Then there is the rescan bug for Squish message bases that puts the wrong
Ol> time on 50% of the messages (one second off), which can cause dupes in the
Ol> network. For a hub this is a really bad bug. It also created the wrong
Ol> idea that the Squish format it fundamentally flawed and that Squish cannot
Ol> store the original time correctly, which is not true. That this hasn't
Ol> been fixed in 20+ years is astonishing.
I have heard that but it has never been a problem for me, no links here have ever told me there was an issue. We need to know what the problems are before we can even hope for a solution, so we need to bring issues up with the developers and keep talking about it until we get a solution.
Ol> Is it open source? Is it possible that bugs get fixed by the community.
Ol> That would be my first requirement for a software that runs the network
Ol> backbone. So yes, hpt is better than Mystic for hub stuff (I think).
Ol> Though a interactive UI (like Mystic's) for configuration makes it easier
Ol> to configure a tosser.
It's not open source. Not every programmer can work in a group but in the case of Mystic the author is interested in solving problems. Development is not always fast but it is ongoing.
Ttyl :-),
Al
... What bug? That's a feature
--- SBBSecho 3.12-Linux
* Origin: The Rusty MailBox - Penticton, BC Canada (21:4/106.1)
