MBBS(1)

NAME
mbbs - a bulletin board system

SYNOPSIS
mbbs [--external|-e] [--xterm-title|-x|--no-xterm-title]
mbbs --scan mbbs --version
mbbs --help

DESCRIPTION
mbbs is a full-screen menu-oriented Bulletin Board System (BBS), built on the same code behind mview(1). Since it relies solely on UNIX itself for security and user authentication, no central server other than that which the files are held on is needed, and no special software other than a UNIX-like operating system is required. On startup, mbbs reads the global configuration file (see FILES, below) to determine the filename of the top-level menu. From then on it behaves like mview(1), except that before running any UNIX command it drops its setgid privileges.

OPTIONS

-e, --external
    Log in as an external (non-Unix) user, rather than logging in as the current Unix account.

-x, --xterm-title
    Use the xterm title to display the current action. This is the default if the terminal type in $TERM is "xterm".

-X, --no-xterm-title
    Do not use the xterm title to display the current action.

-c, --no-colours, --monochrome
    Do not output any colour attributes; view everything in black and white.

-s, --scan
    Perform a scan (like pressing [SPACE] in the main menu), but don't actually log in or view any files, just list what the scan would have hit. Outputs nothing if there would be nothing to look at.

--help
    Print a usage message on standard output and exit successfully.

-V, --version
    Print version information on standard output and exit successfully.

ENVIRONMENT

TERM
    Used to determine the current terminal type. If it starts with "xterm" then xterm titling is turned on by default.

ACTION_FILE
    If the file referred to by $ACTION_FILE exists and is writable when mbbs starts up, the current action will be stored here every time it changes.

MANIM_PROG
    Program to use instead of qmanim to run Anim programs. Note that whatever program you specify must accept the -n and -e options (account name and nameline).

REMOTE_HOST
    What to put in the "Location" field on the Users On screen if the relevant information cannot be obtained from the utmp(5) file. Useful if you are running your BBS on a machine to which you do not have root access, since you can hang telnetd(8) off a port using inetd(8) and tell it to use a script instead of login(1) - you can then write this script such that it sets REMOTE_HOST accordingly.

BUGS
Whatever bugs mview(1) has. Since a full security audit has not been done on this package, it may be possible for a malicious user to gain access to the "bbs" group. This is not likely but should be taken into consideration when deciding what the contents of the BBS should be.

FILES

/etc/bbsrc
    Global configuration file. See the Texinfo manual for full details.

AUTHOR
Andrew Wood <mconv@ivarch.com>
mconv: http://mconv.sourceforge.net/

SEE ALSO
mconv(1), mview(1), mgid(1), mtime(1), mte(1), mtrunc(1)