NOS 2.0a problems

[Murray_RJ@cc.curtin.edu.au]

   I've just got v2.0a going, and it looks quite impressive. There are a couple
of things which are going to cause problems in forwarding sessions to BBSes,
however.

   First off, having the "Current message # " line and the expert prompt line
on separate lines will almost certainly cause problems. AA4RE BBSes get upset
when faced with any line not ending in a '>' before the session starts in
earnest; remember these lines will be sent before the BBS sends its SID to
get the plain '>' prompt. It's hard to keep track of what's happening since
my host forwards to me at 0230 each day, so (unless I'm awake) I never see the
transfers taking place. I understand  the reason why the non-expert prompt
line was split in two, but maybe there's a way to accommodate both problems.
I would prefer to run in non-expert mode if possible, since first-time users
are bound to go away if it looks too hard, and I'd like to attract as many
as possible to NOS.

   I could solve the first problem by running in expert mode as the default;
unfortunately that's broken as well. The first prompt under these circumstances
is a plain '>', with no trailing newline. Unfortunately, the BBS expects a
newline here, so again a forwarding session would crash.

   Thirdly, there seems to be no way to get NOS to eat the first line of an
AX25 connection when running with jumpstart off (it could be done in 1.9d by
uncommenting a couple of lines and re-compiling). While jumpstart seems to be
working fine (but see below), I'd still like to retain the previous method
of getting a BBS to send a dummy line. Unfortunately, unless this line is
swallowed by NOS, the mbox attempts to parse it, causing error messages which
cause the BBS to abort the session.

   These are probably the main problems with 2.0a that I've encountered so
far. I've been running 1.9d for a week (or so), but yesterday I turned
jumpstart on. After the mailbox had received its incoming mail, it tried to
send some out (which rarely happens) and crashed. The log just says "NOS
started", so I don't know if the watchdog worked or if it got crashed to
cold-boot level. I'd sent a couple of messages out a day or two before, with
jumpstart off, with no problems, so perhaps enabling jumpstart does make NOS
more crash-prone.

 .....Ron

                                ***
 Ron Murray (vk6zjm)
 Internet: Murray_RJ@cc.curtin.edu.au
     Are we having fun yet?    -- Garfield