On 1/10/21 7:16 PM, James B DiGriz wrote:
Synchronet is still very much "a thing".
Yes, and no.
Yes, there is /a/ product named Synchronet, probably from the same
vendor or subsidiary. However, I don't think that it is the /same/ product.
More specifically, I believe that contemporary Synchronet is more of a
suite of packages. And those packages are traditional Linux packages.
I believe the old DOS / Windows (?) Synchronet package is LONG since dead.
I'm not familiar with the message base format it uses,
"JAM" message format comes to mind from conversations with the original
SYSOP. Though I don't know if that's what Synchronet is using or
something else from conversstion collisions.
and a lot will depend on the version you have,
I'm guessing it's from '95 - '99. 2.x or 3.x comes to mind.
but there should be utilities available for exporting messages directly
from a mounted disk image, or at least a running instance.
I suspect the best thing to do would be to restore the VM, boot it, and
see what I can find. MS-DOS 5.x or 6.x don't need many resources. I
think the machine had a ~300 MB hard drive and ~32 MB of memory (if that).
Should something be available on the Synchronet website or Vertrauen
BBS. There is a support echo still on Fidonet, too, iirc.
Is the echo /active/? I know that there are LOTS of newsgroups still in
active files on news servers, even though the the newsgroup hasn't seen
traffic in years.
Worst case you can read messages to a capture log, or export .QWK to
an offline reader with any version since the early '90s.
I'm sure there's something clever that we can do to get data out. }:-)
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die
