Using UUCP under a BBS system???

[Thomas E. Dell]

peter at ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes:

>I don't understand this aversion to giving BBS users UNIX ids. You can
>make the BBS program their login shell and have all the advantages of
>a secure environment, and you won't have to do any special gyrations
>to get mail working.
>
>Sure, there are a handful of interactive programs you have to hack, but
>there are more free mailers/editors/pagers that you can hack the way you
>like than you can shake a stick at.
>
>Really, what's the problem?

With say 2,000 BBS users, I would prefer they all use one group account
than add two thousand unnecessary lines to the password file. 

And if you play games with getty, you can make it so that dialup BBS 
users receive your BBS directly, instead of /bin/login. No one will try 
to break into 'root', 'uucp', etc. as it tempting with Unix BBS's. 

The approach taken by Waffle is to include mail & news as an integral
part of the BBS - there is no worry of escaping out of external programs,
and you have considerably more control over which newsgroups users may
have access to {post,read}. This also leads to a much nicer UI. Of course 
if you WANT to do this via externals ("roll your own"), you can, but it 
isn't recommended.

For importing mail, a program is supplied to receive mail diverted from
smail or sendmail aliases. This may require a large number of aliases, but 
I prefer this method over granting individual accounts or using an "akcs." 
prefix in front of everyone's username.

Like AKCS, waffle is also commercial ($100 for Xenix source, contact 
root at vox.darkside.com for details if anyone is interested). 

     ...Tom

dell at apple.com / root at vox.darkside.com / Thomas E Dell