As I mentioned in another post, I'm working on features for 0.6.6, and only addressing major bug issues on 0.6.5 if I find them.

Currently I'm working on ssl encryption between nodes, the nntp server and readers. Internal connections (between rslight and nntp) are not encrypted. They are meant to be on the same machine, and I don't wish to modify newsportal.php right now to handle this.

I now have encryption working for both spoolnews and nntp. There will be a config setting to enable/disable each. This allows nodes to communicate over whatever network encrypted, and to use encrypted connections to whatever nntp server they choose to communicate with. Of course newsreader users will be able to connect with ssl also.

This is all working, but still testing and cleaning up. 0.6.6 won't be released for a while, as there will be other features for me to work on. Just posting my progress as I do things.

Retro Guy

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Posted on: novaBBS
www.novabbs.com

>Currently I'm working on ssl encryption between nodes

Will you use self signed certs for that ?

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Posted on def4

anon wrote:

>>Currently I'm working on ssl encryption between nodes

> Will you use self signed certs for that ?

In config you can point to your cert and key, so it can be from a cert authority, or self signed.

I've tested with a 'letsencrypt' cert and self signed. Both work fine, but to connect to a self signed, you need to set in config to allow that.

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Posted on: novaBBS
www.novabbs.com

Retro Guy wrote:

> anon wrote:

>>>Currently I'm working on ssl encryption between nodes

>> Will you use self signed certs for that ?

> In config you can point to your cert and key, so it can be from a cert authority, or self signed.

> I've tested with a 'letsencrypt' cert and self signed. Both work fine, but to connect to a self signed, you need to set in config to allow that.

I should also mention that it will auto-generate a self signed cert if no cert is present, and you are trying to use ssl for your nntp server. It is meant to be very simple and automatic, but the option to configure is there if you wish to use a different cert (like letsencrypt or whatever).

Retro Guy

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Posted on: novaBBS
www.novabbs.com

Retro Guy wrote:

> Retro Guy wrote:

>> anon wrote:

>>>>Currently I'm working on ssl encryption between nodes

>>> Will you use self signed certs for that ?

>> In config you can point to your cert and key, so it can be from a cert authority, or self signed.

>> I've tested with a 'letsencrypt' cert and self signed. Both work fine, but to connect to a self signed, you need to set in config to allow that.

> I should also mention that it will auto-generate a self signed cert if no cert is present, and you are trying to use ssl for your nntp server. It is meant to be very simple and automatic, but the option to configure is there if you wish to use a different cert (like letsencrypt or whatever).

I've installed this version on rslight.i2p. Now running 0.6.6.

The site now opens an unencrypted port and an ssl port. Both work fine. While it's not really important on i2p or tor, I can test it via clearnet and have knode connected via ssl and it's working fine.

I have a test site connected to rslight.i2p via ssl and it's working fine. So two rslight installs communicate just fine via ssl now. The cert is auto generated (self signed), or you can configure to point to a real cert, which works fine also.

Retro Guy

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Posted on: novaBBS
www.novabbs.com

Retro Guy wrote:

> I have a test site connected to rslight.i2p via ssl and it's working fine. So two rslight installs communicate just fine via ssl now. The cert is auto generated (self signed), or you can configure to point to a real cert, which works fine also.

I finally have this working properly. Had a lot of trouble with spawned processes not exiting and overloading the server. It took me a while to figure it out, and as usual it was one simple thing, fread vs fgets. That fixed the issue and now I have the proper number of processes running.

Quick i2p specific question: I set a timeout on these network connections so they can't be held open forever and waste resources. Currently it is 30 seconds. Is this enough for an i2p connection, or should I make it a bit longer?

Retro Guy

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Posted on: novaBBS
www.novabbs.com

Retro Guy wrote:

> Quick i2p specific question: I set a timeout on these network
> connections so they can't be held open forever and waste resources.
> Currently it is 30 seconds. Is this enough for an i2p connection, or
> should I make it a bit longer?

In many cases it is enough. However, connection timeout to
wwcqkwfo5yhe6uribv5tzylk25j5hkdk6gdnyftzd3k7dawlzwca.b32.i2p sometimes
occur.

Anonymous wrote:

> Retro Guy wrote:

>> Quick i2p specific question: I set a timeout on these network
>> connections so they can't be held open forever and waste resources.
>> Currently it is 30 seconds. Is this enough for an i2p connection, or
>> should I make it a bit longer?

> In many cases it is enough. However, connection timeout to
> wwcqkwfo5yhe6uribv5tzylk25j5hkdk6gdnyftzd3k7dawlzwca.b32.i2p sometimes
> occur.

wwcqk... is a inn2 server. I'm not sure what the timeout is for inn2, but I'll check into it. It may just be the system default for a network connection, but I'm not sure.

For testing I'm running two rslight sites connected together. I should probably change it so they communicate over i2p and watch for (too many) lost connections. I'll change that in a few days.

The 30 seconds above is for when the server is waiting for a command. Nothing in 30 seconds and it drops the connection. If it receives a command, the timer restarts waiting for the next time input is expected.

Retro Guy
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Posted on: Rocksolid Light
news.novabbs.org

0.6.6 is running on rslight.i2p and novabbs.com.

Supports ssl both incoming and outgoing. An ssl port is opened for newsreaders as part of this. I currently run a test site that connects only to another rslight site using ssl, and it's working fine. I also have a newsreader connected to one rslight site by ssl and have no problems. Some of my posts are sent this way.

Thread list for a group shows the username of who started the thread (it's always done this), but now also shows the username of the latest post in the thread. I plan to change the formatting a bit to make it look better on a desktop, and maintain the current look on small devices.

Search results are now sorted properly, newest at top.

I will very slowly be moving config options into one array to make it easy to carry options into functions if needed. Vichan does this and I like the idea, so copying it :)

Retro Guy

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Posted on: novaBBS
www.novabbs.com

Added a feature to the header bar of each message. If you enable display of Message-ID in config, there will be a checkbox next to it. If you click that a drop down will open displaying the full message headers for the message.

This is all done in css, no javascript. I still need to style the checkbox, but for now it's working well.

Retro Guy
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Posted on: Rocksolid Light
news.novabbs.org

Finally found a good way to tremendously speed up creating the threads page while displaying last poster for each thread.

I was not happy with how slow it was after adding that feature but now it is, from an end user point of view, just about instantaneous. Previous to this, it was taking one to two seconds for groups with maybe 35,000 posts. That doesn't seem long, but it's a delay noticable by a user, and it was really wasting processing time. Now, it's working very well.

I knew how I wanted to fix it, but it took me a while to get it done. I read the group overview from the end (newest) and go backward to find the article info. This makes sense as most users are looking at newer threads instead of older ones. Since the threads are sorted by date, newest to oldest, I was wasting time starting at the top (bottom) again for each thread. Now I have it working properly to just start where it left off, and never read the same line in the file again for a group.

I still would like to create a php function to read the file line by line from the end, which I can write just haven't yet, but right now I'm still using 'tac' ('tail -r' on freeBSD) and it's working fine.

Retro Guy

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Posted on: novaBBS
www.novabbs.com

Glad you got it done, although I don't understand the problem really, I 'm afraid.
Would it not be much faster to read the whole thing into mem and then treat it as an array ?

And why is this post not on def2 ? Is this a crosspost ? I still have fix this, atm def2 rejects all messages going to several groups.

cheers

trw

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Posted on def3

On Thu, 24 Sep 2020 15:28:56 -0400
Guest <guest@retrobbs.rocksolidbbs.com> wrote:

> Glad you got it done, although I don't understand the problem really,
> I 'm afraid. Would it not be much faster to read the whole thing into
> mem and then treat it as an array ?

Yes, it is much faster to read into an array, but that takes memory.
When testing on a large group with a lot of posts, it uses up php's
limit of memory so I just read the file directly.

> And why is this post not on def2 ? Is this a crosspost ? I still have
> fix this, atm def2 rejects all messages going to several groups.

I just checked and the message you replied to is only in one group:
Newsgroups: rocksolid.nodes.announce

rocksolid.nodes.announce on def2 looks stalled since 04/17/20 There are
a number of posts since then that I don't see there. Maybe it has
stopped polling this group for some reason? I'll check other groups in
a bit, maybe it's just one group.

Are you still pulling posts using code from rslight? If so, maybe we
can modify the function to drop groups from the Newsgroups: header, and
only leave one group before it ever gets to vichan? Would that maybe be
a way to solve it?

Retro Guy

>rocksolid.nodes.announce on def2 looks stalled since 04/17/20 There are
a number of posts since then that I don't see there. Maybe it has
stopped polling this group for some reason?

Maybe a db-fuckup of some kind. I need to check on my end.

>Are you still pulling posts using code from rslight? If so, maybe we

I pull from a lot of servers, all rslight plus the news servers. I appreciate your proposal, but I'd rather solve this on the vichan site (using pretty much the method you described). Otherwise you would have to deploy this hack everywhere or I'd have to limit def2 to a specific sever.

cheers

trw

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Posted on def3

On Fri, 25 Sep 2020 04:29:48 -0400
Guest <guest@retrobbs.rocksolidbbs.com> wrote:

> >Are you still pulling posts using code from rslight? If so, maybe we
>
> I pull from a lot of servers, all rslight plus the news servers. I
> appreciate your proposal, but I'd rather solve this on the vichan
> site (using pretty much the method you described). Otherwise you
> would have to deploy this hack everywhere or I'd have to limit def2
> to a specific sever.

What I meant was are you still using code from the rslight codebase in
vichan to pull posts :)

>What I meant was are you still using code from the rslight codebase in vichan to pull posts :)

ah, ok. no, there is an independent code running now.
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Posted on: Rocksolid Light
dkzerogt6z6ybhcj.onion

I'm messing with colours in the css for rslight. Not quite pleased with the results right now, I'll need to get back to it next week.

I need a good blue(ish) color for links and visited links, a good contrast that still shows up well. I've missed the mark so far :)

Retro Guy

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Posted on: novaBBS
www.novabbs.com

Retro Guy wrote:

> I'm messing with colours in the css for rslight. Not quite pleased with the results right now, I'll need to get back to it next week.

> I need a good blue(ish) color for links and visited links, a good contrast that still shows up well. I've missed the mark so far :)

It's a bit better now. Not done yet, but moving away from the greens.

Retro Guy

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Posted on: novaBBS
www.novabbs.com

Made a change to nntp.php to significantly improve xover for large groups. Previously it would compile the data, then send it. Now it starts sending immediately and continues until the final requested article number.

I know that sounds obvious, but it's not how I originally wrote it :)

Retro Guy

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Posted on: novaBBS
www.novabbs.com

I've now standardised display of poster names and their links to search. It's all in one function now, just called to display.

'From: ' names that are only an email address or names that are mime encoded will not have a search link. I find this better than a search link that will lead to no results.

Retro Guy

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Posted on: novaBBS
www.novabbs.com

Retro Guy wrote:

> I've now standardised display of poster names and their links to search. It's all in one function now, just called to display.

> 'From: ' names that are only an email address or names that are mime encoded will not have a search link. I find this better than a search link that will lead to no results.

I've improved this now to handle mime encoded headers. Search should work with From or Subject that is mime encoded, and the links have now been put back in place.

Retro Guy

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Posted on: novaBBS
www.novabbs.com

There is now a toggle in config to hide part of poster's email addresses. I have it off on retrobbs, but on on rslight.i2p. I plan to turn it off on rslight as I was just testing. It will stay enabled on www.novabbs.com as this is really for clearnet users. If they want to supply their email address, they can just include it in their post. It can also be set for each 'section', like most config options.

Viewing message headers seems to be working ok, as is providing a link to the last post in each thread. These aren't perfect, but seem to be working fine 99% of the time. I know why 'last post' doesn't work a very small percentage of the time, but it's good enough for now. To fix that small percentage would be a lot of work and I'm lazy and my weekend is over now :(

I've fixed a bug where if a message was deleted on an rslight site, it would cause a very rare chance of another site missing the next message. The other site would need to be polling the rslight site, and specifically be polling that group in the time between deletion and another message gets posted. The message would still be propagated by the rslight site, but if the other site was only polling this site, it might miss it. I know, strange thing, but it's fixed now.

Currently working on threading for groups that are mostly mailman mailing lists (like comp.lang.python). They won't thread properly as each message from the list gets a new Message-ID before it's posted to usenet, and this mid doesn't match the References in other messages. This leads to a big string of unthreaded messages.

I see how I can thread them, all the info is in the headers, but it's a bit of work and I don't have time atm. Hopefully, I can spend some time on this next week.

Retro Guy

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Posted on: novaBBS
www.novabbs.com

Added LISTGROUP command support for the rslight nntp server, and improved logging. I'll be adding a $debug toggle to increase/decrease logging as necessary. Of course I need to see a lot more in the logs during development than a user would need to see.

Yes, the logs hide passwords :)

Retro Guy

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Posted on: Rocksolid Light
rslight.i2p

To: retro.guy
retrobbs.i2p is now running the latest code.

Configuration has changed quite a bit with a goal toward at least not adding to complexity, and hopefully reducing it. A config file for each section is no longer required, but if you wish a section to use a different config, just copy the main file and change as you wish.

phpmailer config has been cleaned up and easier to manage.

Some more minor css modifications.

I'll test on retrobbs.i2p for a while before applying to rslight.i2p and other sites.

while ($bug === true) {
fix_bug($bug);
$bug = create_bug($bug);
}

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Posted on RetroBBS
www.rocksolidbbs.com

AnonUser wrote:

> To: retro.guy
> retrobbs.i2p is now running the latest code.

> Configuration has changed quite a bit with a goal toward at least not adding to complexity, and hopefully reducing it. A config file for each section is no longer required, but if you wish a section to use a different config, just copy the main file and change as you wish.

rslight.i2p is now running the new code also.

I need to get the install script up to date and then try installing (not just overwriting) onto novabbs.

Retro Guy

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Posted on Rocksolid Light
news.novabbs.org