To: Digital Man
Hey DM,

I've been playing with SVDM of late (using Portal of Power as the frontend, and my old Ezycom BBS).

I've noticed a repeatible issue - I'm not sure how to provide more debugging if you are interested.

I'm running on Windows 7, 32 bit.

If I leave POP running, with a regular daily poll to my linux mailer, after some time (havent counted), the polls start to fail. I can see from the logs that a connection is made to my linux mailer, it responds but it is like SVDM doesnt pass through the response back and thus POP thinks the remote end is "sleeping". An EMSI session never starts.

Naturally shutting down the mailer and restarting and I'm good to go.

I have noticed however, that while outbound calls fail, inbound calls work as expected. Further, after an inbound call (and exiting to the BBS), upon return, an outbound call works again (for a random number of times) before failing with the same symptoms above.

Is this enough for you to understand what's not working?

SVDM reports itself as v0.2.

....δεσ∩

---
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To: deon
Re: SVDM
By: deon to Digital Man on Wed Dec 21 2022 10:04 pm

> Hey DM,
>
> I've been playing with SVDM of late (using Portal of Power as the frontend,
> and my old Ezycom BBS).

Awesome! Glad to hear someone's getting use of it!

> I've noticed a repeatible issue - I'm not sure how to provide more debugging
> if you are interested.

Run dbgview (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/debugview) and capture the output from SVDM (messages prefixed with "SBBSVDM" are from SVDM, so filtering on that string can be good). Annotate that debug output with the time of the issue paste into a message or upload it here and hopefully that'll give us more to go on.

> I'm running on Windows 7, 32 bit.
>
> If I leave POP running, with a regular daily poll to my linux mailer, after
> some time (havent counted), the polls start to fail. I can see from the logs
> that a connection is made to my linux mailer, it responds but it is like
> SVDM doesnt pass through the response back and thus POP thinks the remote
> end is "sleeping". An EMSI session never starts.
>
> Naturally shutting down the mailer and restarting and I'm good to go.

That also re-executes SVDM?

> I have noticed however, that while outbound calls fail, inbound calls work
> as expected. Further, after an inbound call (and exiting to the BBS), upon
> return, an outbound call works again (for a random number of times) before
> failing with the same symptoms above.
>
> Is this enough for you to understand what's not working?
>
> SVDM reports itself as v0.2.

That's the latest.
--
digital man (rob)

Sling Blade quote #4:
Doyle: wimpy-ass kids or mental retards.. she got one of each livin' with her.
Norco, CA WX: 70.6°F, 26.0% humidity, 0 mph ENE wind, 0.00 inches rain/24hrs
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To: Digital Man
Re: SVDM
By: Digital Man to deon on Wed Dec 21 2022 10:58 am

> Awesome! Glad to hear someone's getting use of it!

Yeah, I like your implementation - I've been playing with different BBSes and mailers, and having them all think they have COM1 makes it super easy... :)

> > I've noticed a repeatible issue - I'm not sure how to provide more
> > debugging if you are interested.
>
> Run dbgview

Got it, and running - I've tried a few manual polls but it hasnt failed, so I'll leave it running for a few days...

> > Naturally shutting down the mailer and restarting and I'm good to go.
> That also re-executes SVDM?

Yes. SVDM is loaded from a .bat file (the bat file is just a short cut command to call SVDM with all the options). It, once loaded, calls my mailer .bat file which is much larger, trapping exit levels to know whether to process mail or load the BBS.

....δεσ∩

---
■ Synchronet ■ AnsiTEX bringing back videotex but with ANSI
--- Synchronet 3.20a-Linux NewsLink 1.113
* Vertrauen - Riverside County, California - telnet://vert.synchro.net

To: deon
Re: SVDM
By: deon to Digital Man on Thu Dec 22 2022 08:44 am

> Re: SVDM
> By: Digital Man to deon on Wed Dec 21 2022 10:58 am
>
> > Awesome! Glad to hear someone's getting use of it!
>
> Yeah, I like your implementation - I've been playing with different BBSes
> and mailers, and having them all think they have COM1 makes it super easy...
> :)

Cool. I've been planning to make another demo video and then call that version 1.0 and release it officially, but haven't prioritized that yet. If everything goes smoothly with the video/demo, then v0.2 and v1.0 would likely be functionaly identical.

> > > I've noticed a repeatible issue - I'm not sure how to provide more
> > > debugging if you are interested.
>
> > Run dbgview
>
> Got it, and running - I've tried a few manual polls but it hasnt failed, so
> I'll leave it running for a few days...
>
> > > Naturally shutting down the mailer and restarting and I'm good to go.
> > That also re-executes SVDM?
>
> Yes. SVDM is loaded from a .bat file (the bat file is just a short cut
> command to call SVDM with all the options). It, once loaded, calls my mailer
> .bat file which is much larger, trapping exit levels to know whether to
> process mail or load the BBS.

Okay, the reason I asked was to help determine if it was state in SVDM or the mailer itself that might need to be "reset" to get things working again. Are you able to restart the mailer without exiting your batch file loop (and thus restart SVDM) - as a test?
--
digital man (rob)

This Is Spinal Tap quote #3:
How much more black could this be? and the answer is none. None more black.
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To: Digital Man
Re: SVDM
By: Digital Man to deon on Wed Dec 21 2022 04:35 pm

Howdy,

> Okay, the reason I asked was to help determine if it was state in SVDM or
> the mailer itself that might need to be "reset" to get things working again.
> Are you able to restart the mailer without exiting your batch file loop (and
> thus restart SVDM) - as a test?

So I tried a couple of things (when I saw that inbound was working):

* I called in and "hung up" before the mailer exited to the BBS - that didnt fix the outbound calling. But when I called in and control was passed to the BBS (and then hanging up), outbound calling started working.

* Based on the first, I also tried the mailer's "shell to DOS" and returned, but that didnt fix the issue.

So I'm wondering if the mailer "initialising the comports" is initializing something in SVDM?

So its been a few hours, and I just tried a poll and it failed, so I'll prepare the log file for you..

....δεσ∩

---
■ Synchronet ■ AnsiTEX bringing back videotex but with ANSI
--- Synchronet 3.20a-Linux NewsLink 1.113
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To: Digital Man
Re: SVDM
By: Digital Man to deon on Wed Dec 21 2022 04:35 pm

> Cool. I've been planning to make another demo video and then call that
> version 1.0 and release it officially, but haven't prioritized that yet. If

Great, when you do, can I make a recommendation?

I've notice a sprawl of client.ini, dosxtrn.env and dosxtrn.ret on my system (as I've been playing around), in many locations. I'm assuming that they are created in the "current"(?) directory when SVDM is started?

Are they needed to kept?

I was going to ask if:
* A setting in svdm.ini could have them all go in a 'temp' directory - and then perhaps suffixed by a port (or something else) - in case there are more than 1 SVDMs running at a time, OR
* Deleting them on exit (unless say -d is used, then it probably makes sense to keep them?

Anyway, SVDM is pretty cool - and does the job nicely :)

....δεσ∩

---
■ Synchronet ■ AnsiTEX bringing back videotex but with ANSI
--- Synchronet 3.20a-Linux NewsLink 1.113
* Vertrauen - Riverside County, California - telnet://vert.synchro.net

To: deon
Re: SVDM
By: deon to Digital Man on Mon Dec 26 2022 10:39 am

> Re: SVDM
> By: Digital Man to deon on Wed Dec 21 2022 04:35 pm
>
> > Cool. I've been planning to make another demo video and then call that
> > version 1.0 and release it officially, but haven't prioritized that yet.
> > If
>
> Great, when you do, can I make a recommendation?

Yes, of course.

> I've notice a sprawl of client.ini, dosxtrn.env and dosxtrn.ret on my system
> (as I've been playing around), in many locations. I'm assuming that they are
> created in the "current"(?) directory when SVDM is started?
>
> Are they needed to kept?

No, not really. Sometimes useful for debuging purposes.

> I was going to ask if:
> * A setting in svdm.ini could have them all go in a 'temp' directory - and
> then perhaps suffixed by a port (or something else) - in case there are more
> than 1 SVDMs running at a time, OR
> * Deleting them on exit (unless say -d is used, then it probably makes sense
> to keep them?

Yeah, I'll look into cleaning up those files.

> Anyway, SVDM is pretty cool - and does the job nicely :)

Awesome. Hopefully we can get to the bottom of this particular issue quickly.
--
digital man (rob)

This Is Spinal Tap quote #2:
Nigel Tufnel: Well, this piece is called "Lick My Love Pump".
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