• MIS install on Bare Metal or VM - Debian Bullseye (and Buster)

    From Bradley D. Thornton to All on Sunday, September 01, 2019 06:52:28
    Hey I just did a little cookbook style howto/tutorial on installing Mystic BBS on a fresh install of Debian Bullseye. I also verified that it will install w/o issue on Buster as well - a/o today!

    I'm sure it will continue to work for about a year or two, and I can even release a little shell script that will perform the whole thing in under two minutes (on a 4 core Xeon, not sure about lower powered boxes). The only caveat for this doc and also any script I may release is that there are I think, four files, and they're obviously going to change, that need to be d/l'd. When those URIs change the script (and the instructions) will break.

    Things like configuring SSHD and setting TZ, installing tmux, ntpdate, and essential cronjobs, etc., are beyond the scope of the document. And I'm old school so I don't believe in that sudo crap - sudo is for allowing certain commands that users on your system can run (like HUP'ing BIND so they can update their zonefiles and such), or granting particular users the permission to su to root. If I were to write up a doc to incorporate sudo, it would be much more restrictive as the non-riv'd user would not have a shell. This is a BBS and a decent minimal debian box with a restrictive firewall should suffice nicely considering most boards are using telnet anyway. Opinions vary, but that's my story and I'm sticking with it :p

    Special thanks goes out to Paul for his videos, and the wikis too.

    I make this available in the event that someone finds it useful. They prolly won't, but if a few people do lemme know whenever one of the packages or tarballs update and I'll affect accordingly. Well, I really don't need to, it's CC-BY-SA so... enjoy :)

    <snip>

    # mysticbbs_install-debian_bullseye.txt

    # v20190901 Copyright 2019 Bradley D. Thornton - http://NorthTech.US

    # Licensed under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

    +---------------------------------------+
    | Mystic BBS install/config/maintenance | +---------------------------------------+

    # mystic stuffs

    The following cookbook style tutorial will take you through all of the
    Steps required to install your Mystic Internet Server (Mystic BBS).

    All of the steps, in the order they occur here, have been tested and
    verified to work on a fresh Debian GNU/Linux install as of the date of
    this version of the document - you can perform the following on bare
    metal or a virtual machine in the cloud (VPS).

    The particular versions this has been tested with are:

    Debian 10 (Buster)

    Debian Testing (Bullseye)

    Let's get started, shall we?

    ------------------------------------------------------------------------

    # firewall!!!

    # Before anything we need a firewall, so let's install a utility to
    # manage our firewall and open up the ports for ssh, telnet, and mail

    apt-get install -y ufw
    ufw allow 22
    ufw allow 23
    ufw allow 25
    ufw status enable
    systemctl start ufw



    ------------------------------------------------------------------------
    # Installing Mystic BBS

    These instructions presume starting in /root as root

    Instructions to be completed by the mystic user will start with a "$"

    I choose to install mystic in /home/mystic and have it run as that user.

    Since the install script (which you run as root) can't install mystic
    into a pre-existing dir, this is one way to get around that:

    adduser mystic # go ahead and add the user with a shell or noshell.

    cp -av /home/mystic /home/mysticb # or mv, preserves the user's dotfiles

    # if you used cp -a, then remove the directory now:

    rm -frv /home/mystic # install script will recreate this dir

    mkdir -pv stufff/mystic # We're going to put the package there

    cd stuff/mysticbbs

    wget http://www.mysticbbs.com/downloads/mys112a43_l64.rar # prolly

    apt-cache install -y unrar # we need this to explode the archive

    unrar e mys112a43_l64.rar # a/o 20190831, this is the latest tarball

    ./install # choose /home/mystic/ and down arrow - autofils other dirs

    chown -Rv mystic:mystic /home/mystic

    cp -av /home/mysticb/* /home/mystic/ # just moves back the dotfiles

    rm -frv /home/mysticb

    cd /home/mystic

    ./mystic -l # create new user (you). Then run mystic -cfg after exiting

    ./mystic -cfg # and configure your BBS (is beyond the scope of this doc)


    ------------------------------------------------------------------------

    # Instructions at the end of the install script - keep this info ;)

    <snip>
    Switch to the Mystic directory (/home/mystic/) and then:

    Please read the Wiki at wiki.mysticbbs.com for installation
    instructions and notes on using Mystic under Linux

    Type "./mystic -l" to login (do this first to make your SysOp account)
    Type "./mystic -cfg" to run the configuration utility
    </snip>

    # don't do any of this yet - instead, complete the steps below and then
    # read the tl;dr at the very end so you know exactly what you need to
    # do once you start your Mystic Internet Server (aka, your shiney BBS!)

    # hint: There's some kewl videos by Paul Hayton to walk you through
    # all of those steps!


    ------------------------------------------------------------------------

    System Directory /home/mystic/
    Data Directory /home/mystic/data/
    Text Directory /home/mystic/text/
    Menu Directory /home/mystic/menus/
    Msg Base Directory /home/mystic/msgs/
    Semaphore Directory /home/mystic/semaphore/
    Script Directory /home/mystic/scripts/
    Attach Directory /home/mystic/attach/
    Logs Directory /home/mystic/logs/

    ------------------------------------------------------------------------

    # supporting ssh:

    # make sure we have gcc installed by entering, "which gcc". If not, then

    apt-get -y install build-essential manpages-dev

    # Now we need to get Cryptlib, then compile and install the shared .so

    mkdir -pv /root/stuff/cryptlib; cd root/stuff/cryptlib

    wget https://cryptlib-release.s3-ap-southeast-1.amazonaws.com/cryptlib345.zip

    unzip -a cryptlib345.zip

    make shared

    # now let's move the shared Cryptlib library to the proper place
    # and rename it so Mystic can find it.

    cp -v libcl.so.3.4.5 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libcl.so

    # More info on the how and why can be found in the mystic wiki here:
    # http://wiki.mysticbbs.com/doku.php?id=cryptlib

    ------------------------------------------------------------------------

    # Spellcheck

    # Let's start by installing the depdendancy, the libhunspell package:
    apt-get -y install libhunspell-dev

    $ mkdir -pv /home/mystic/stuff/spellcheck
    $ cd /home/mystic/data/stuff/spellcheck

    $ wget http://www.mysticbbs.com/downloads/mystic_spellcheck_v2.zip

    $ unzip mystic_spellcheck_v2.zip

    $ cp -v dictionary.aff /home/mystic/data/
    $ cp -v dictionary.dic /home/mystic/data/
    $ cp -v wordlist.txt /home/mystic/data/

    # You can customize your dictionary by adding commonly used words not
    # already in the dictionary one word per line, in wordlist.txt




    ------------------------------------------------------------------------

    # set up custom country ban capabilities

    $ mkdir -pv /home/mystic/stuff/ip2location
    $ cd /home/mystic/stuff

    $ wget http://download.ip2location.com/lite/IP2LOCATION-LITE-DB1.IPV6.BIN.ZIP

    $ unzip IP2LOCATION-LITE-DB1.IPV6.BIN.ZIP

    $ cp -v IP2LOCATION-LITE-DB1.IPV6.BIN /home/mystic/data/

    ------------------------------------------------------------------------
  • From Bradley D. Thornton to All on Sunday, September 01, 2019 08:11:50
    Re: MIS install on Bare Metal or VM - Debian Bullseye (and Buster)
    By: Bradley D. Thornton to All on Sun Sep 01 2019 06:52 am

    Hey I just did a little cookbook style howto/tutorial on installing Mystic BBS on a fresh install of Debian Bullseye. I also verified that it will
    install w/o issue on Buster as well - a/o today!

    I make this available in the event that someone finds it useful. They prolly won't, but if a few people do lemme know whenever one of the packages or
    tarballs update and I'll affect accordingly. Well, I really don't need to, it's CC-BY-SA so... enjoy :)


    Well dang!

    Got a message that I'm a SPAMmer, and the message was truncated at 200 lines.

    I realize that maybe that could be considered a flood, and apologies for that.

    So what I did, so anyone can help maintain any of this, is to just put it up on one of my git servers. PRs are welcome :)

    https://devo.linboard.org/tallship/mystic # it's in the docs dir if anyone's interested, with links to a couple of Pauls videos.

    Kindest regards,

    Bradley

    .
  • From Al@1:153/757 to Bradley D. Thornton on Sunday, September 01, 2019 21:19:30
    Got a message that I'm a SPAMmer, and the message was truncated at 200 lines.

    I dunno what that's all about. That message arrived fine here and I wouldn't call it spam. Not even close.

    --- BBBS/Li6 v4.10 Toy-4
    * Origin: The Rusty MailBox - Penticton, BC Canada (1:153/757)
  • From Paul Hayton@3:770/100 to Bradley D. Thornton on Monday, September 02, 2019 16:46:33
    On 01 Sep 2019 at 06:52a, Bradley D. Thornton pondered and said...

    Special thanks goes out to Paul for his videos, and the wikis too.

    I make this available in the event that someone finds it useful. They prolly won't, but if a few people do lemme know whenever one of the packages or tarballs update and I'll affect accordingly. Well, I really don't need to, it's CC-BY-SA so... enjoy :)

    Thank you for the mention and taking the time to create the instructs :)

    Best, Paul

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A43 2019/03/03 (Windows/32)
    * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (3:770/100)