[HECnet] Fidonet and FIDOGW::

About Fidonet ============= Fidonet was started by Tom Jennings in 1984 to enable system operators of dial up bulletin boards to exchange mail between their boards and respective users. The network quickly expanded beyond simple mail exchange ("netmail") to deliver both newsgroup style discussion forums ("echos") as well file transfer and distribution via various mechanisms, and by the 1990s had grown to tens of thousands of hosts with hundreds of thousands of users. By the end of the 1990s, however, the network was rapidly shrinking as both sysops and users moved to the Internet and BBSs were wound down. More on this rather sad story can be found at: http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/ The BBS scene isn't entirely dead in 2009 and shows some signs of revival - old sysops are returning to set up boards (mostly accessed by telnet) and users are starting to return in a slow trickle. The glory days of the 90s will probably never return, but BBSing is still a fun hobby for any retrotechnology oriented geek. It works on a store-and-forward basis, with hierarchical organisation divided into Zones, the top level Fidonet org, somewhat analogous to a DNS TLD, Nets, second level org, perhaps a little like a DNS domain, however a Fidonet host always has a Node number, which is the lowest form of publicly reachable Fidonet hosts. Finally, a Node may have private sub-nodes called Points - the node itself is Point 0. The address is expressed as follows: 2:250/7.0 (Zone 2 = Europe, Net 250 = UK, Node/Point 7 = B4BBS) There is no standard syntax for expressing a username + node address, typically the node was entered separately in software. FIDOGW:: - The HECnet - Fidonet Netmail Gateway =============================================== The HECnet gateway uses the following addressing format for mails going out to Fidonet: FIDOGW::"FIDONET ADDRESS "!" GIVENNAME_SURNAME" Example: FIDOGW::"2:250/7.0!Sampsa_Laine" NOTE: You MUST include the full Fidonet address including the zone and point - otherwise the message will be dropped. The quotes are necessary as VMS MAIL does not appreciate this rather complex notation otherwise. Inbound mail from Fidonet should be addressed to the node 2:250/88.0, the recipient name should be set to the full HECnet MAIL 11 address, e.g. CHIMPY::SAMPSA. The HECnet gateway only supports netmail for now, echos support might be added in the future should people show interest in this. For now, a user desiring access to echos should obtain an account on B4BBS, this is accessible either by logging in as B4BBS on CHIMPY::, telnet to b4bbs.sampsa.com or via the Flash client at http://sampsa.com/b4bbs. Finding other hosts on Fidonet can be done either via downloading and compiling a nodelist (not possible on VMS/RSX) or a web based nodelist search tool, such as my feeble attempt at http://rhesus.sampsa.com/cgi-bin/fidonodes/findnode.com One thing to keep in mind about Fidonet netmail are the very unpredictable message delivery times. The message may take days to be delivered as it travels up and down between nodes and mailhubs, some of which might only make a connection over dial up once a day. Final note: Fidonet is a community of amateurs with certain community standards that members adhere to. More details of these (suggested reading for all gateway users) can be found in the Fidonet POLICY4 document accessible at: http://www.fidonet.us/policy4.html More info can be found on the Wikipedia Fidonet entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fidonet or these sites: http://www.fidonet.org/ http://www.fidonet.us/ http://www.fidonews.info/public/fidonews/default.htm I hope you enjoy this facility! Regards, Sampsa