Online Amateur Radio Community Wiki

Or “What I have learnt on my journey”…

First you will need to edit your Config File either on the UI or within a terminal to enable LinMail, add a mail user name and password and allocate an application, shown in red text below:

• Enable LinMail by inserting ‘LINMAIL’ either before the first port, or after the last port but before 'APPLICATIONS'
• Add the BBS ‘APPLICATION’. This takes the form;
  • APPLICATION n,CMD,New Command,Call,Alias,Quality,L2Alias
    • See https://www.cantab.net/users/john.wiseman/Documents/BPQCFGFile.html
• Add a BBS username and password
  • <example required>

Once done, save your edit and restart BPQ

<sudo systemctl restart bpq>

You should now see an extended top menu on the main page. Including links for ‘MailMgmt’ and ‘WebMail’

Many boxes to complete and lots of checks to get right. Let's try to take these one at a time.

• BBS Call: Your node callsign
• SYSOP Call: Your callsign.
• H Route: Your node's 'address'; the # indicates the county, followed by country and continent codes a.. separated by a dot.
• Redirect msgs to BBS Call to SYSOP Call: Self explanatory (I think)
• BBS APPL No: The SSID of your BBS; by convention usually 1
• Streams: Maximum number of simultaneous contacts. 32 is good enough

Mostly self explnanatory but beware of the double negatives

WP Destinations is where you would list stations you wish to receive any WP Updates generated by your node Housekeeping (more of which later)

TBH - not really sure of these. We need an edit…

Initial description which can be fully completed at a later date

Example of a node and a BBS - descriptions as required

Screensnip & description

The complex bit - lots of work here

There are several scenarios that could be true. Pick the one that best matches your install right now and it should tell you how to set up forwarding rules.

You are the only BBS you can see. There may be other packet stations around but you are in a little network island of your own.

Set yourself up as a user in mail and configure the account as a BBS. Everyone else will create and read mail on your node. It won't go anywhere so no forwarding rules are required.

This scenario is missing from the table below because no mail is forwarded.

Most likely if you have just set up. You can see one BBS that's already running and doing network magic, you just want in. This is also the case if there are several BBSs but you only care about one Big BBS that can do all the collation and distribution.

Create a user for that BBS. Set them up as a BBS in their settings. In the forwarding table set “WW” as the only rule for floods and personals.

They do the same for you and all mail specifically for you is delivered via an implicit AT match.

Several people have set up in your region. There may be a gateway to the wider network, but that's not you.

Create a user for every BBS you can see directly. Set them up as a BBS in their settings.

Set WW as the only rule for floods for all your neighbour BBSs. Mail to any one of them specifically will be picked up as an implicit AT rule for that BBS and go there directly.

If there is a hidden BBS you can't see but you know exists, add the full HA for that BBS to the personals rules for next best BBS you can see. This means knowing the BBSs in your area and how best to reach them.

If there is a gateway node, set them up with a WW rule in personals. Anything not explicitly or implicitly handled above means it goes to the wider world. If you can't see the gateway, add the WW rule to the next-best BBS you can see.

You're region is self contained except for one node that can see out of your region and that node is you.

The node outside your region gets WW in floods and personal.

The nodes inside your region get set up with your region address [e.g. #77.gbr.euro] in floods. Personals are handled by implicit or explicit rules as in the section above.

Your region has two or more links to other regions and they are managed by different nodes.

Set yourself up as the next best scenario above. Then add the other known regions to the next-best node you can see. This can be tricky because it might be the next city over or it might be the next continent over. This is expert level stuff and may be expanded on later.

Mostly self explanatory