• Mystic Command Line Shutdown switch

    From Solaris@21:2/1202 to g00r00 on Sun May 12 13:21:28 2019
    Is there a way to add a command line shutdown for mystic ? . something like c:\mystic\mis -shutdown /q , or c:\mystic\mis -restart /q. This would allow
    me to perform batch file daily restarts of my mystic servers .

    Thanks
    - Solaris

    |08Sys|05op So|13laRis
    |13 Err|05or 12|0802 BBS !
    |15I make Bill Ga|07tes do my Te|08ch Support

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A43 2019/02/06 (Windows/64)
    * Origin: Error 1202 BBS (21:2/1202)
  • From Cmech@21:2/117 to Solaris on Sun May 12 13:46:46 2019
    * An ongoing debate between Solaris and g00r00 rages on ...

    Is there a way to add a command line shutdown for mystic ? . something like
    c:\mystic\mis -shutdown /q , or c:\mystic\mis -restart /q. This would allow me to perform batch file daily restarts of my mystic servers .

    I use Cmdow:

    === Cut ===
    cmdow "Mystic Internet Server (The Positronium Repository)" /CLS
    cmdow "Mystic Internet Server (The Positronium Repository)" /END
    === Cut ===

    The CLS does an orderly shutdown then I do a forced with END to be sure. You might have to delete the MIS.BSY semaphore after the END. :)

    Download it from: http://cmech.dynip.com/filebase.bbs/bfds/CMDOW148.ZIP


    .- Keep the faith, --------------------------------------------------.
    | |
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    ... Best way to stop a runaway horse: Place a bet on it.
    --- GoldED+/W32-MSVC v1.1.5-g20180902 + Mystic v1.12 A43 Win32
    * Origin: FSXNet - Positronium: telnet://cmech.dynip.com (+SSH) (21:2/117)
  • From Solaris@21:2/1202 to Cmech on Tue May 14 10:45:18 2019
    I use Cmdow:
    cmdow "Mystic Internet Server (The Positronium Repository)" /CLS
    Download it from: http://cmech.dynip.com/filebase.bbs/bfds/CMDOW148.ZIP

    So I tried this program and it works , a little to well, its like a off now switch , its a cool program but I think we need a program that closes the MIS server clean . Shutting it off dirty causes issues with locked busy nodes and Im worried this may bork the Hub . Thanks for the suggestion .

    |08Sys|05op So|13laRis
    |13 Err|05or 12|0802 BBS !
    |15I make Bill Ga|07tes do my Te|08ch Support

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A43 2019/02/06 (Windows/64)
    * Origin: Error 1202 BBS (21:2/1202)
  • From xqtr@21:1/111 to Solaris on Tue May 14 16:18:52 2019
    So I tried this program and it works , a little to well, its like a off now switch , its a cool program but I think we need a program that
    closes the MIS server clean . Shutting it off dirty causes issues with locked busy nodes and Im worried this may bork the Hub . Thanks for the suggestion .

    You can write a bash script which closes mis server and after succeeding it, shuts down the computer. From inside a mystic menu you can add an external command to execute that script at +5 min after the current time, so you can exit it normal. the script will run automatically and the xomputer will close normal.

    :: XQTR :: Another Droid BBS :: andr01d.zapto.org:9999 :: xqtr@gmx.com

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A43 2019/03/03 (Raspberry Pi/32)
    * Origin: Another Droid BBS # andr01d.zapto.org:9999 (21:1/111)
  • From Avon@21:1/101 to xqtr on Wed May 15 16:23:02 2019
    On 14 May 2019 at 12:18p, xqtr pondered and said...

    So I tried this program and it works , a little to well, its like a o now switch , its a cool program but I think we need a program that closes the MIS server clean . Shutting it off dirty causes issues wit locked busy nodes and Im worried this may bork the Hub . Thanks for t suggestion .

    You can write a bash script which closes mis server and after succeeding it, shuts down the computer. From inside a mystic menu you can add an external command to execute that script at +5 min after the current
    time, so you can exit it normal. the script will run automatically and
    the xomputer will close normal.

    Certainly fair to say it would be a welcome switch for g00r00 to add upon his return.

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A43 2019/03/03 (Windows/32)
    * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)
  • From MeaTLoTioN@21:1/158 to Avon on Wed May 15 05:45:25 2019
    On 15 May 2019, Avon said the following...

    On 14 May 2019 at 12:18p, xqtr pondered and said...

    So I tried this program and it works , a little to well, its lik now switch , its a cool program but I think we need a program th closes the MIS server clean . Shutting it off dirty causes issue locked busy nodes and Im worried this may bork the Hub . Thanks suggestion .

    You can write a bash script which closes mis server and after succeed it, shuts down the computer. From inside a mystic menu you can add an external command to execute that script at +5 min after the current time, so you can exit it normal. the script will run automatically an the xomputer will close normal.

    Certainly fair to say it would be a welcome switch for g00r00 to add
    upon his return.


    Not sure a killswitch to shutdown cleanly is the answer... I only saw this message and don't know the past thread, but would be better to just make sure that upon startup it checks for old semaphores and bsy files and cleans them out... rather than a complete shutdown script... right? Seems a little
    overkill to accomplish something not huge?

    My start script does this, when I run it, it will check the semaphore folder and anything that shouldn't be there is trashed before mis server starts.

    ---
    |14Best regards,
    |11Ch|03rist|11ia|15n |11a|03ka |11Me|03aTLoT|11io|15N

    |07── |08[|10eml|08] |15ml@erb.pw |07── |08[|10web|08] |15www.erb.pw |07───┐ |07── |08[|09fsx|08] |1521:1/158 |07── |08[|11tqw|08] |151337:1/101 |07┬──┘ |07── |08[|12rtn|08] |1580:774/81 |07─┬ |08[|14fdn|08] |152:250/5 |07───┘
    |07── |08[|10ark|08] |1510:104/2 |07─┘

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A43 2019/03/02 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: The Quantum Wormhole, Ramsgate, UK. bbs.erb.pw (21:1/158)
  • From Avon@21:1/101 to MeaTLoTioN on Wed May 15 16:52:55 2019
    On 15 May 2019 at 01:45a, MeaTLoTioN pondered and said...

    Not sure a killswitch to shutdown cleanly is the answer... I only saw
    this message and don't know the past thread, but would be better to just make sure that upon startup it checks for old semaphores and bsy files
    and cleans them out... rather than a complete shutdown script... right? Seems a little overkill to accomplish something not huge?

    Hi :)

    I think the issue is about being able to issue scheduled graceful shutdown of MIS so things close cleanly and then other stuff like backups etc can run
    then MIS is restarted.

    I don't agree with the idea that on startup a script just clearing old semaphores and bsy files... they are usually still there to prevent something from running that closed badly at the time a problem occurred. So better IMHO to remove those manually and force the sysop to go looking as to what
    happened.

    **waves hello :) **

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A43 2019/03/03 (Windows/32)
    * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)
  • From MeaTLoTioN@21:1/158 to Avon on Wed May 15 06:04:55 2019
    Hi :)

    Hey back =)

    I think the issue is about being able to issue scheduled graceful
    shutdown of MIS so things close cleanly and then other stuff like
    backups etc can run then MIS is restarted.

    Is it an issue to back it up while it's running then? Not sure what other stuffs you got running that require mis server to be shut down... but I never shut mine off, the only time it's powered down or rebooted is if there's a power cut lol. That happens so infrequently though.

    I don't agree with the idea that on startup a script just clearing old semaphores and bsy files... they are usually still there to prevent something from running that closed badly at the time a problem occurred. So better IMHO to remove those manually and force the sysop to go
    looking as to what happened.

    To each their own, I never shut mystic down to perform backups or anything,
    no need to as far as I can tell... runs perfectly well and hasn't been shut
    off more than a couple of times during power cuts lol. The sem files that get created are just empty files anyway so it's not like it has something to go
    on to "continue" after it does come back to life, so no point keeping them after a dirty shutdown imho.

    **waves hello :) **

    ***waving back***

    What's the future like today? You must be nearly at the end of your lunch break?

    ---
    |14Best regards,
    |11Ch|03rist|11ia|15n |11a|03ka |11Me|03aTLoT|11io|15N

    |07── |08[|10eml|08] |15ml@erb.pw |07── |08[|10web|08] |15www.erb.pw |07───┐ |07── |08[|09fsx|08] |1521:1/158 |07── |08[|11tqw|08] |151337:1/101 |07┬──┘ |07── |08[|12rtn|08] |1580:774/81 |07─┬ |08[|14fdn|08] |152:250/5 |07───┘
    |07── |08[|10ark|08] |1510:104/2 |07─┘

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A43 2019/03/02 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: The Quantum Wormhole, Ramsgate, UK. bbs.erb.pw (21:1/158)
  • From esc@21:1/112 to Avon on Wed May 15 05:32:21 2019
    Certainly fair to say it would be a welcome switch for g00r00 to add
    upon his return.

    This reminds me - what are people doing for backups? I'd love to have some
    sort of backup event on a daily/weekly job to freeze all the nodes while
    files are copied to a backup location, verified (md5sum?), etc., all the typical backup stuff, and then re-open the nodes.

    I was planning on doing just a cronjob but I have mis running as a systemd service and that would be simply...ugly. And failure prone.

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A43 2019/03/03 (Windows/32)
    * Origin: Black Flag <ACiD Telnet HQ> blackflagbbs.com (21:1/112)
  • From deon@21:2/116.1 to esc on Wed May 15 09:52:08 2019
    On 15 May 2019, esc said the following...
    This reminds me - what are people doing for backups? I'd love to have

    So I run mystic in docker - and I use "restic".

    My backup is:
    * Docker pause mystic
    * Restic backup
    * Docker unpause mystic

    Restic is incremental, can de-dupes, compresses and can store stuff on another disk, another server running or in S3 (which is what I have) - it is
    configured to keep the last 14 backups in S3. I also have a backup on a USB stick, which I keep the last 2 backups.

    ...deon

    _--_|\ | Deon George
    / \ | Chinwag BBS - A BBS on a PI in Docker!
    \_.__.*/ |
    V | Coming from the 'burbs of Melbourne, Australia

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A43 2019/02/23 (Raspberry Pi/32)
    * Origin: Chinwag | MysticBBS in Docker on a Pi! (21:2/116.1)
  • From MeaTLoTioN@21:1/158 to deon on Wed May 15 13:40:38 2019
    This reminds me - what are people doing for backups? I'd love to have

    So I run mystic in docker - and I use "restic".

    My backup is:
    * Docker pause mystic
    * Restic backup
    * Docker unpause mystic

    Restic is incremental, can de-dupes, compresses and can store stuff on another disk, another server running or in S3 (which is what I have) -
    it is configured to keep the last 14 backups in S3. I also have a backup on a USB stick, which I keep the last 2 backups.

    I had used just rsync and zip to archive all files up into daily, weekly, monthly files, but recently I've installed a bareos server and now I have my mystic container with the bareos client and the bareos server backs up and handles all the scheduled daily/weekly/monthly backups. I even have aes256 encrypted backups... just in case =) - all my backups are stored on a network mount on a separate machine automatically which is nice.

    I also use my bareos backup server to back up the tqwNet UK and CA hubs, so everything gets backed up nicely over the ZeroTier private network.


    I don't shutdown mystic or anything, I haven't had any issues with backing it up while it's still live, and with bareos you can set exclude folders or
    files so even if someone was on the bbs, neither the bbs nor the backup will break.

    Not sure if this is _best practice_ but it works and think it actually is a much nicer solution to just my rsync/zip attempt that was a cronjob before.
    And it saves disk space =)

    If anyone is interested in bareos as a backup solution, it's definitely worth
    a look... it's very versatile, it's a bit of a pig to set up right, but it's well worth the effort.

    Doco for it is here: https://docs.bareos.org/

    Install doco here: https://docs.bareos.org/IntroductionAndTutorial/InstallingBareos.html

    Hope this helps out someone... it definitely has me =)

    ---
    |14Best regards,
    |11Ch|03rist|11ia|15n |11a|03ka |11Me|03aTLoT|11io|15N

    |07── |08[|10eml|08] |15ml@erb.pw |07── |08[|10web|08] |15www.erb.pw |07───┐ |07── |08[|09fsx|08] |1521:1/158 |07── |08[|11tqw|08] |151337:1/101 |07┬──┘ |07── |08[|12rtn|08] |1580:774/81 |07─┬ |08[|14fdn|08] |152:250/5 |07───┘
    |07── |08[|10ark|08] |1510:104/2 |07─┘

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A43 2019/03/02 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: The Quantum Wormhole, Ramsgate, UK. bbs.erb.pw (21:1/158)
  • From esc@21:1/112 to deon on Thu May 16 04:02:55 2019
    So I run mystic in docker - and I use "restic".

    Interesting. But what happens if you try to

    * Docker pause mystic

    when someone is online? And a step further, what happens when you try to
    resume mystic and someone was online? How does it handle that?

    I could take a backup while users are online just fine but would prefer something more robust, locking nodes, maybe telling users that we're
    undergoing backups, etc.

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A43 2019/03/03 (Windows/32)
    * Origin: Black Flag <ACiD Telnet HQ> blackflagbbs.com (21:1/112)
  • From esc@21:1/112 to MeaTLoTioN on Thu May 16 04:04:42 2019
    I also use my bareos backup server to back up the tqwNet UK and CA hubs, so everything gets backed up nicely over the ZeroTier private network.

    Slick. I'll give this a look. FWIW I have been using resync, but I am also
    the only current user, so can't attest to what other solutions look/feel like in comparison :) Thanks for sharing this.

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A43 2019/03/03 (Windows/32)
    * Origin: Black Flag <ACiD Telnet HQ> blackflagbbs.com (21:1/112)
  • From deon@21:2/116.1 to esc on Thu May 16 10:21:19 2019
    On 16 May 2019, esc said the following...
    Interesting. But what happens if you try to
    * Docker pause mystic
    when someone is online? And a step further, what happens when you try to resume mystic and someone was online? How does it handle that?

    Well, probably what a should do is send a message to the user logged in,
    and/or setup an event so they have to logoff before the backups run (I
    remember doing that in the 90s).

    But, with docker pause, its like the machine "freezes", and then unfreezes.
    The backup of both Mystic and MBSE takes about 2.5mins (since it is always incremental) - so a logged in user would feel like its locked up.

    Two things could happen:
    1) the user kills their connection and/or tries again
    2) TCP retries occur (because it wouldnt get an ACK) - and the stack will eventually decide the connection is lost.

    If the user is still logged in, it would "unfreeze" and BAU - but if the connection was lost (because the user disconnected and/or TCP reset the connection), then its normal a normal cleanup as a result of a network disconnect.

    So why do I "pause" - it means the backup files are somewhat consistent
    (still technically fuzzy though), in that they all represent the same point in time. It would be like restarting after the power was pulled - only better in that any I/O in memory that hasnt yet been staged to disk is still included
    in the backup.

    ...deon

    _--_|\ | Deon George
    / \ | Chinwag BBS - A BBS on a PI in Docker!
    \_.__.*/ |
    V | Coming from the 'burbs of Melbourne, Australia

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A43 2019/02/23 (Raspberry Pi/32)
    * Origin: Chinwag | MysticBBS in Docker on a Pi! (21:2/116.1)
  • From MeaTLoTioN@21:1/158 to esc on Thu May 16 12:05:20 2019
    Slick. I'll give this a look. FWIW I have been using resync, but I am
    also the only current user, so can't attest to what other solutions look/feel like in comparison :) Thanks for sharing this.


    Well the ZeroTier networking is Deon's idea and baby, he set it all up and I just configured my BBS, and the hubs to use it, which works super well.

    Let me know what you think of the bareos solution... I think it's definitely worth a look if nothing more, but I really like it.

    ---
    |14Best regards,
    |11Ch|03rist|11ia|15n |11a|03ka |11Me|03aTLoT|11io|15N

    |07── |08[|10eml|08] |15ml@erb.pw |07── |08[|10web|08] |15www.erb.pw |07───┐ |07── |08[|09fsx|08] |1521:1/158 |07── |08[|11tqw|08] |151337:1/101 |07┬──┘ |07── |08[|12rtn|08] |1580:774/81 |07─┬ |08[|14fdn|08] |152:250/5 |07───┘
    |07── |08[|10ark|08] |1510:104/2 |07─┘

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A43 2019/03/02 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: The Quantum Wormhole, Ramsgate, UK. bbs.erb.pw (21:1/158)
  • From Solaris@21:2/1202 to MeaTLoTioN on Thu May 16 11:43:00 2019

    To each their own, I never shut mystic down to perform backups or anything, no need to as far as I can tell... runs perfectly well and hasn't been shut off more than a couple of times during power cuts lol. The sem files that get created are just empty files anyway so it's not like it has something to go on to "continue" after it does come back to life, so no point keeping them after a dirty shutdown imho.

    So here's the deal, I have FSXnet hub 2 and support about 50 nodes . outs /
    ins message / file toss never stops . When messages drop to 50 nodes then exporting begins , a dirty shutdown like a power failure is bad news . My
    start up recovery batch cleans the semaphore and .BSy files but mystic has a tendency to bork when it is super busy and an dirty off event happens, now Error 404 holds about 22 nets and dirty shutdowns have caused issues there as well . Error 1202 only has 2 nets and I never shutdown it down.

    I need a clean command line shutdown command because (mostly*) a file gets tossed from a node ( not the hub ) that should not have tossed , typically
    is the file is huge and borks the hub. so I Need to write a batch to do a
    daily shutdown and restart of mystic clean to reset the HUB. just shutting mystic off , then performing a cleanup on restart often wont fix the issue.

    |08Sys|05op So|13laRis
    |13 Err|05or 12|0802 BBS !
    |15I make Bill Ga|07tes do my Te|08ch Support

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A43 2019/02/06 (Windows/64)
    * Origin: Error 1202 BBS (21:2/1202)
  • From bcw142@21:1/145 to Solaris on Sun Jun 9 14:21:01 2019
    On 16 May 2019, Solaris said the following...

    I need a clean command line shutdown command because (mostly*) a file
    gets tossed from a node ( not the hub ) that should not have tossed , typically is the file is huge and borks the hub. so I Need to write a batch to do a daily shutdown and restart of mystic clean to reset the
    HUB. just shutting mystic off , then performing a cleanup on restart
    often wont fix the issue.

    Sysop SolaRis
    Error 1202 BBS !
    I make Bill Gates do my Tech Support

    If you look the person never shutting down is using Linux/64 and you use Windows/64, that's the reason for the differences. I use both, but mostly Linux the last 10 years or so. I find it harder to run things under Windows that Linux, but some thing don't exist (like good video editors) under Linux.
    I need to use Windows to edit videos (most not all, OpenShot will edit some).

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A43 2019/03/03 (Raspberry Pi/32)
    * Origin: Mystic Pi BBS bcw142.zapto.org (21:1/145)