AmiBinkD - a native AmigaOS binkd, and how it gets tested ---------------------------------------------------------

AmiBinkD is a port of binkd to AmigaOS 3.x. It talks straight to bsdsocket.library - no ixemul, no ixnet - and runs on real 68k iron
or under emulation. BinkP/1.1, CRAM-MD5, works with C-Net/5 and any
other FTN-aware BBS.

The goal is not to write a new mailer. It is to get *binkd itself*
running on the Amiga. 18 of binkd's 34 source files are completely
untouched, and protocol.c - the binkp engine, 3,769 lines - carries
exactly one Amiga-specific line. Where the port does deviate, it is
almost always to work around something broken in the Amiga C library,
not to change how binkd behaves.

TESTING

It runs on a live board carrying seven networks, and that is where
the bugs turn up. Recent examples, all found in production:

* Outbound mail was going out as ZERO BYTES - every bundle, always.
Nothing logged an error, because no layer had one: the tosser
packed a valid archive, and binkd sent exactly the byte count it
was given. The cause was libnix13's fstat(), which always reports
st_size == 0 (it measures with SEEK_CUR right after seeking to the
start). Upstream binkd's code was correct; the C library was not.
Fixed by overriding fstat(). If you build ANY Amiga software with
-mcrt=nix13 and it depends on file sizes, this affects you too.

* Log lines were being torn in half when two sessions wrote at once.
binkd locks its log - but with a private semaphore, which is fine
for one process with threads. This port runs each session as its
own AmigaOS Process, so the lock has to be a PUBLIC semaphore to
span them.

* Concurrent sessions all logged under one id, so three simultaneous
inbound calls read as triplicated lines. Now each has its own.

RELEASES

v10.25 is current and in the file area. v10.29 follows once its soak
is done - by then the fixes are mostly small: quieting a benign lock
race that logged at error level, and removing a diagnostic that
turned out to be reporting garbage.

Nothing ships until it has run on the board for a day or more. A fix
that has not survived a real night of traffic is a guess.

Reign of Fire BBS - call.rofbbs.com - telnet 6800 / ssh call@

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* C-Net/5
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