Subj : MBSE/FreeBSD
To   : All
From : Sean Dennis
Date : Sat Jan 08 2022 02:14 pm

Hi everyone,

I'm happy to say that over the past 24 hours, we were able to get MBSE
running under FreeBSD without issues.  We do not currently see any reason
one cannot run MBSE as a "daily driver" under FreeBSD.

Please note that the other BSDs are not tested at this time as there are
known issues with OpenBSD and NetBSD.  We are only supporting MBSE under
FreeBSD due to limited time and resources.

I am setting up my own BBS and an additional BBS as a private test bed for
MBSE under FreeBSD 13-STABLE.

Three notes with MBSE and FreeBSD:

- The sysctl "security.bsd.see_other_uids" tuning knob must be set to 1 (on)
  in /etc/sysctl.conf as the main 'mbsebbs' process is run under the user
  who logs in and if that is turned off, mbtask gets confused and panics
  since it cannot see other PIDs it did not create.

- The telnet program as provided on FreeBSD 13 uses SRA (secure telnet) and
  if you telnet in from the command prompt, telnet sends the currently
  logged in user's info to mblogin and it gets confused.  So if you do use
  FreeBSD's telnet program, you must add "-K" (uppercase K) in the command
  line, i.e. "telnet -K 127.0.0.1".  Other operating systems do not have
  this issue that we are aware of.

- The calling line in inetd.conf for inbound telnet connections must be
  configured to disable SRA.  We will make it so the following line will be
  correct when MBSE is first installed but for now, you will need to modify
  that line to look like this (this is all one line; remove the \):

  telnet  stream  tcp     nowait  root   /usr/libexec/telnetd \
    telnetd -X SRA -p /opt/mbse/bin/mblogin

With these changes, MBSE should be working fine under FreeBSD.  We will be
doing a lot more testing but for now we feel that MBSE should be stable
enough to be used for a BBS.

I will be adding this information to the documentation this weekend.

We are working on trying to get DOSemu to compile under FreeBSD but that's a
much more complicated issue but we're confident we can get it working.

We're hoping to release MBSE 1.0.8 very soon.

As always, thank you for using MBSE.

-- Sean
   (Representing the MBSE Development Team) 
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