Last update 08-Oct-2000MBSE BBS - Internet Gateway.
WARNING: THIS IS DIFFERENT FROM VERSION 0.33.14 AND UP
Introduction.
Since version 0.33.14 the email gateway is build into MBSE BBS. To route email trafic to and from the internet you need a internet MTA. I stopped using sendmail for this because it gave too much trouble setting it up together with MBSE BBS. Today I use Postfix, a well documented, secure and easy to setup MTA. For the actual gate from Postfix to the BBS you I use mbmail which you need to add to the Postfix configuration.
For the newsgate you (still) need the ifmail package. That will be dropped with version 0.33.15.
There may be two reasons to create a gateway, one is to gate internet news and email to the Fidonet bbs users, another reason may be that you want to make echomail as news available on your system so that users can connect to your bbs with their favourite browser an get the mail and news using pop3 and nntp protocols. The setup is the same for both reasons so I will make one description for the whole setup.
Necessary software packages.
Besides MBSE BBS you need the following software installed on your system: inn news for the internet news server and suck if you want to exchange news with the internet. For testing you need a mail and news client on your system. If you want to exchange mail and news with the internet or want that users can dialin with ppp, you need ppp software installed on your system as well. Installing all these packages is beyond the scope of the MBSE BBS project, you must read the documentation in these packages about how to install it. The example configuration files work on the development system but they may or may not work at your system.
Setup a news gateway node.
You need to setup a special node which you use to send and receive news. Name that system's sysop "News Gate" or something like that. Assign it a point number for the Fidonet echomail areas such as 2:280/2802.99 (if your main aka is 2:280/2802). In all examples I will use these addresses, you need to change that to your own setup of course. There are some settings for this node that are important: "Pack netmail - yes", "Send notify - no" and "Don't call - yes". In the mail setup set a session password for this node so that nobody can dial to your system with these aka's and set "Check PKT pwd" to no. This is because ifmail doesn't insert .pkt passwords. In the mail groups, set all your Fidonet areas on, and for internet news use a separate group. With the global commands in the message area setup you can connect the Fidonet and internet news areas to the gateway. You don't need to setup file areas.
Gateway configuration.