Configuration tools

One thing I wanted to have for Icy Board are console configuration tools. PCBoard was a complex system so it did split up configuration in several parts. 

So does IcyBoard. This blog post gives an overview of the various tools.

mkicbmnu

For creating & changing menu files - I've used that in the demo of the menu system. 

mkicbtxt

 

This one is used for changing the BBS display strings. Every string the BBS displays is stored in a icbtxt.toml file (or pcbtxt). IcyBoard usually uses the .toml format so it's possible to use an ordinary text editor for everything. 

However I prefer config tools :).Note: mkicbtxt can be used to change PCBTXT files as well. It doesn't alter the format.

icbsetup


Icbsetup is the main configuration utility. All BBS options, conferences, file & message areas can be configured with this tool. IcyBoard inherits a complex structure from PCBoard to work with and ads some more options on the pile. The main file is "icyboard.toml" which is the new "pcboard.dat". It contains lots of references to other configuration files which are exposed in icbsetup.

 

Like PCBSETUP there are built in editors for almost any of these configuration files. For example the security file editor for setting the limits:

 

icbsetup is used to create new configurations. On command line with "import" it's possible to import existing pcboard installations to IcyBoard and create creates a new default installation.

icbsysmgr

icbsysmgr currently can only edit users & groups. It's basically like icbsetup.
 

Status

So far I all tools are working. I would say mkicbtxt is 100%, mkicbmnu 90%, icbsetup ~80%, icbsysmgr ~85%. They can all need more polish but some editors are missing in icbsetup (for example one to change the @ colors) and icbsysmgr can need an option to create users and better controls for group management.
 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Icy Board Menu System

Image
PCBoard had a built in menu system - there were several hooks where a .mnu file could be used instead of a display file or .ppe. IcyBoard will support custom menus as well the .mnu files get translated to icyboard menu files and there is an editor "mkicbmnu" to edit them. MKICBMNU    The original one: MKPCBMNU The general idea a menu system like RemoteAccess/MysticBBS. The original menus supported hot keys and commands. IcyBoard menus will add lightbars on top of these.  The commands are more complex than the original PCBoard commands, therefore the setup is a bit different. And has two parts - a command list: Command list And a setup screen where the command can be set up: Setup screen For lightbars the commands need to display a selected/non selected text. For the other types display & highlight text can be empty. Each command has an action list attached these actions can run on selection or activation.  This command has 3 actions - gotoxy & print text whic...
Read more

File Processing

The file handling won't be much different than that from PCBoard. However I need to research the PPEs for a final decision :). Internally it'll be different. PCBoard works basically just with a text file. IcyBoard will have a more database like approach. I want to provide a file scanner/repacker to work with file bases. It should support the most common formats out of the box. I want to provide as much code in Rust as possible which is a problem in that area. That's why I've begun working on compression algorithms. I ported zip compression methods Shrink, Reduce and Implode to zip-rs (excellent blog post about these methods are here: https://www.hanshq.net/zip2.html). I've implemented an ARJ decompressor and started working on ARC. There seems to be a working RAR library that I can just use as well as LZH/LHA. So it'll support 7Z, ZIP, ARJ, RAR, LHA/Z and ARC out of the box. The rest needs to be done with external packers. If you think that I need to support ano...
Read more