##### Last update 17 August 2020

# Introduction to MBSE BBS

### Welcome!

Thank you for considering MBSE BBS for your BBS needs. We, the MBSE Development Team, think that while MBSE BBS is constantly being improved upon, it is an excellent choice for running a BBS under *NIX. Here's a short list of features:

- Open source, written in C, and available for UNIX, Linux, and BSD.
- Fully Fidonet capable with these features: built-in mail tosser, TIC handler, front-end mailer, areafix, filefix, and more.
- Uses JAM for its message base format
- Able to run DOS doors using DOSemu
- Able to run Linux-native programs as doors
- Newsgroup and email support for both hosting and gating
- QWK and Blue Wave offline mail support
- Built-in "filefind" feature

### MBSE Development Team

The MBSE Development Team is made up of the following people:

- Andrew Leary: lead developer
- Sean Dennis: developer, documentation
- Michael Dillon: developer
- Vince Coen:

### Distribution

MBSE can be obtained via several ways:

- FREQ MBSEBBS from 1:329/219@Fidonet (Phoenix BBS run by Andrew Leary, head MBSE developer) or 1:18/200@Fidonet (Outpost BBS run by Sean Dennis, MBSE developer) — you will receive a ZIP archive with the original tar.gz file in it. This is to let systems who only support 8.3 filenames to pickup the distribution package.
- MBSE Fidonet filebone
- https://sourceforge.net/projects/mbsebbs/
- https://www.mbsebbs.org (official website)

Please note that MBSE BBS's original author, Michiel Broek, offers an old and unmaintained version of MBSE for download. The officially supported updated version can be found on the above websites. New versions of MBSE BBS are announced in the Fidonet MBSE echo (official support), the MIN_BBS echo in Micronet, on our official website, and on Sourceforge.

### History

The original author, Michiel Broek, writes:

> "At the end of 1997, I was looking for several BBS systems that could run on GNU/Linux and needed to be capable to run Fidonet mail. After reviewing almost all packages that were available at that time, I found that there were no packages that suited my needs. Some had the plain user interfaces that my BBS users were used to but no Fidonet capabilities and others looked awful or were difficult to use by normal BBS users without Unix experience. I also didn't want to run shareware any more as one day you pay for some program and the next day support is over because the writer of that program decided to stop development or simply disapears from the Fidonet stage. With all the Y2K problems ahead, the solution should be open source software so that you have the sources in case something goes wrong. One package was very interesting and had the look and feel of RemoteAccess was RapidBBS. There was only one problem: it had no Fidonet capabilities. I rewrote the data structures and created a daemon that should control all BBS actvities. In March 1998, I started writing the mbfido program that should handle all Fidonet mail and .tic files. In June 1998, the final message base format became JAM, using the LoraBBS sources as a guide to create the JAM libraries. The original JAMapi was not stable enough to do all the work that needed to be done.

> In July 1998, the first version of MBSE BBS was installed on the BBS I have on the second line. The first line was running McMail, GEcho, and RA on a Novell client while on the GNU/Linux box the mars_nwe emulator from Martin Stower was running. In November 1998, mbcico was created from ifcico from Eugene M. Crosser. In January 1999, it compiled and ran on a Sun Sparcstation 2 system.

> In April 1999, the motherboard of the GNU/Linux server died. I replaced it with the motherboard of one of the client machines. From that day on, MBSE BBS became the only BBS running on my system because I was short on serial port boards at that time. McMail and RA became history and MBSE BBS was on its own. From that day on, updates were almost daily. All the users and up and downlinks showed that there were plenty of bugs to solve. One month later, most problems were solved.

> In July 1999, Jan van de Werken started beta testing MBSE BBS on his system. In September 1999, MBSE BBS was public released for the first time."

Michiel stopped development of MBSE August 2013. Andrew Leary immediately started maintaining and developing MBSE at that time. Sean Dennis joined the team in 2016 and Michael Dillon joined the team in September 2020.

### Is MBSE "Y2K ready"?

MBSE is "Y2K compliant". Due to the internal date format, this program should run until 2038, just as long as *nix/Linux and the Internet will function without changing the date format.

Go Back