The Crypt Talker (Version 5) 
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This is an advanced talker system based on Nuts v3.2.1 by Neil Robertson.
It has been written over a long period of time by Bryan McPhail (Mish).

I can be contacted at:
	mish@tendril.force9.net

If that fails try:
	mish@mudhole.spodnet.uk.com
	bmcphail@cs.strath.ac.uk
	crypt@churchnet2.ucsm.ac.uk

The webpage for this package is at: http://www.tendril.force9.co.uk/crypt/

At the time of writing the Crypt runs at: churchnet2.ucsm.ac.uk 666
Webpage: http://churchnet2.ucsm.ac.uk/~crypt



Bryan McPhail, August 1997

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Contents:

1: Foreword
2: Differences from Nuts
3: Setup
4: Running & maintaining a talker
5: Customising The Crypt to Make your own Talker
6: Notes about the Windows version
7: Format of CONFIG file
8: 'Bugs' & Comments :)

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1: Foreword:

	Ok, why does the world need another talker system?  Well, I started to
enhance the original Nuts code in my spare time, adding many new features (some
of which Neil copied in his Nuts updates :) and responding to user feedback on
the way the talker operated.  Eventually there were so many changes, the Crypt
differed from original Nuts quite a lot.  I feel the Crypt is sufficiently
different from Nuts to be worth releasing for others to modify and set up
their own talkers based on it.  In particular the Crypt is fully compatible
with Windows 95 & Windows NT and provides a full talker system on those OS's
as well as Unix variants.

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2: Differences from Nuts:

In no particular order here are the things that have been changed, if you 
modify the code you may want to remove or add some commands, particulary
the 'fun' things such as .lick, .lottery etc :)

* All of the bugs in Nuts have been fixed and the code has been improved in a
number of places, including making the main loop more efficent.  

* The look and feel of the system has changed - there is far more colour used 
than before which looks nicer if nothing else :)  Also there is far less use
of background colours which were hard to read on some systems (eg, black text 
onto blue background).

Also users are informed when someone examines them and all users in a room
are told of promotions, muzzlings, etc.  Users also get more information
about them stored such as email address, web address, gender, a pre-desc as 
well as a description, a special rank setting and so on.  You can specify 
an afk phrase when you leave the keyboard and use the shortcuts >> & << to 
continue a private conversation without having to type the users name.

* A .where command has been added for users to see where others are logged in 
from.  The infamous .figlet command has been provided - you will either love
this or hate it!  It's up to you what level users you let have access to it...

* Auto-backups of the userfiles are performed as are an update of the web 
pages for the talker.  High level users can perform automatic Auth checks (see
later) and alter the title bar & icon name of xterm windows.  Various terminal
types are supported.

* A load of 'fun' & social commands have been added such as .lottery, .hug, 
.numpty - some of these are private jokes (esp. the god pidgeon command!) and 
you may want to remove them in your talker :)

* Windows 95 & NT support - The system compiles & runs perfectly on Microsoft
operating systems as well as Unix variants.  At the time of writing I _think_
this is the only telnet talker system that runs on Windows & Unix.

* Users also get their own private home room (as in EW2 talkers) which is 
private even from super-users and the user can invite friends in or boot them
out at will!

* Sensible shortcuts are implemented.  Including use of ' in .tell & .shout 

* The Crypt is also Year-2000 compliant so rest assured it won't crash because
of the 'Millenium bug' :>

* Many EW-2 features have also been incorporated, (.ewtoo command) for partial 
EW-2 compatibilty.  " for speech alias etc.

* The other major difference from Nuts is that the Crypt doesn't contain any
Nuts netlink code.  I felt that this code was pretty useless (sorry Neil!) in
practice, so I saved space by just removing it all.

Anyway, just run Nuts & Crypt side by side and you'll see all the 
differences :>

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3: Setup

Read the file COMPILING to get going.  This says pretty much all you need to
know...  Also included are two extra files...  The first, ncat, is a version
of the Unix cat command that parses Nuts colour codes so you can view the
syslog in colour (Unix only).  The second is called userinfo and provides
various statistics on the users of your talker.

After compiling take a look at the file called config in the datafiles 
directory.  The default one is fine but you'll probably want to change the
port numbers and things when you get going.

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4: Running & Maintaining a Crypt system:

Ok, you'll need a bunch of high-levels users to keep things in order and the
actual coder or someone with access to that account will have to keep the
.where database files up to date.  Whenever someone logs in from an unknown
site, the users name, site & ip address are saved the system log, you can 
find these easily in Unix with the command:

ncat syslog | grep Unknown

which produces all the lines with the word Unknown in them.  The general idea
is just to mark down the ip address with a text line listing country, ISP or
University site, for example.  These lines go into the files 
datafiles/ip_names.* 

The file format is simple, the ip address on one line, the text line on the 
next.

If you don't know ip addresses can be of 3 (well, more) types:

Class A IP's : < 127.*.*.*
Class B IP's : >= 128.*.*.* & < 192.*.*.*
Class C IP's : >= 192.*.*.* 

With class a addresses the first number UNIQUELY identifies the site, so
any address starting with 15 for example are the company Hewlett Packard.
These addresses go in the file ip_names.a and you only have to list the
first number (with a trailing . in the file), eg, 

15.
Hewlett Packard

With class b addresses the first TWO numbers uniquely identify a site, these
addresses go into the file ip_names.b, eg,

130.159.
The University Of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK

And with class c addresses the first THREE numbers are needed to uniquely
identify a site, these go into the file ip_names.c

NOTE:  An organisation may own more than one network,eg several class c's, you
need to note down all the networks on seperate lines (see ip_names.c for an
example).

If you don't know what to put down for the text of a site you can try looking
up www.domainname  to see what the service provider is, or you can do
traceroute sitename (tracert in Windows) and try to figure out who the 
service provider is.

To hunt down all the class c networks a provider owns you can do host -a domain
in Unix and examine the results.

Or you just always ask the person who is logging in from that site :> :>

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5: Customising The Crypt to Make your own Talker

Firstly you should edit datafiles/config and change it to your settings,
it's fairly obvious what everything does...  Then edit all of the rooms files
and message of the day files (including newbie_motd).

Then look at the .h file and change the text strings to whatever you want.
Remember to change the hard-coded admin password.

In the main file, in kill_user(), you can set up personal .kill entries for 
the superusers.  In the function web_page() you should also change the layout
of the .who html file to your preference.

If you can run a web page on your server then I suggest making a directory
called www inside the crypt dir and linking it from public_html.  Then the
.who web page can be written to www/who.html (the default).



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6: Notes about Windows version:

Firstly I have no idea how to come up with a windows equivalent of fork()..
So when you run the crypt on windows you are stuck with a DOS box... To get
around this I have supplied a file called runner.c - this simply runs a process
in the background, ie, no DOS box.  So just edit the file runner.cfg to point
to your Crypt executable and place a link to runner.exe in your Windows
Startup folder.  

Apart from that Crypt on Windows is identical to the Unix version.  In the
future I may do a version which supports more Windows features.  As a side
note Windows DOES include full local loopback so you can experiment with
the Crypt without being online...  Just make sure you have TCP/IP installed
and a working hosts file in your Windows directory.  The format is the same
as the Unix hosts file.  If you don't know what that is then save a file in 
your Windows directory (typically c:\windows) called 'hosts' with this line 
in it:

127.0.0.1       localhost localhost

You should now be able to refer to your machine as localhost or 127.0.0.1
and can run any kind of server on it.

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7: Format of CONFIG file

The config file is fairly easy to follow...  You can just modify the
existing one to your needs.

The ROOMS section is laid out as follows:

<mnemonic> <name> <links>

The links just list the mnemonics of the rooms that can be accessed from 
each room, seperated by commas (NOTE: no spaces!).

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8: 'Bugs' & Comments :)

User boards aren't cleared automatically...  So users must clear them 
themselves (or you can just rm *.B if you like :)

Information about each command can be found in the helpfiles dir, in
particular look at the details for the auth command.

At the moment attempted logins from banned sites & users are marked to 
the syslog and printed to high-level users currently logged on.  It
has been noted that this makes the system possible to attacks from *eViL*
users (ie, scripts or programs that continually try to log in, causing
the syslog to fill up and loss of performance).  If you get problems from
this then comment out the write_syslog() and write_user() calls in 
accept_connection().  If you don't want to ban a site completely because
you have legitimate users there, you can ban new users from logging
in from that site by doing .ban partial <site-name>.  

If you find ANY bugs or compiler errors in this code then mail me to 
let me know (Put Crypt in the subject line) and I will credit you in the
next release (if any).  Any bugs found will be listed on the web page.

At the time of writing though, I wasn't aware of any bugs :>

PLEASE NOTE:  DO NOT mail me with problems about YOUR code!  I won't even
answer :)

The Crypt code includes stub functions which can be used to execute other
programs at certain times of day.  These are off by default in the config
file.  The 1st is called do_backup and the idea is to get it to run a backup
program each day.  If you have 'zip' (and most systems do) then just turn it
on and make sure zip is in the programs path.  You'll have to look at the
code file to make sure the parameters are right for your system.  I use
'zip -r userfiles.zip userfiles' which makes a backup of the userfiles
each night (obviously :)  The 2nd stub is called doweb and I use it to call
a program that produces web pages from the userfiles.  You can call your
own program here or just leave it turned off.

Ok, I know this README file doesn't nearly cover everything but if you have
a general idea of what talkers are and how to use Unix/Windows then you
won't have a problem... :)  

Thanks must go to:

Scott MacKenzie, Marty Greenwell, Chris Jackson, Thomas Neill and probably lots
more people that I can't remember!  (Sorry if you're one of them..)

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