[FlexNet] Re: Paxon (and feeling lost about Flex32 :-)

[Maiko Langelaar (VE4KLM)]

Hi Mike (and group),

> It's working and I can connect to a local
> node reliably, but now I'm kind of lost.

My *response* to your original question is 4 paragraphs
down if you want to skip the philosophical stuff :-)

I kinda felt the same too when Flex32 itself came out
and months later, I saw a lack of applications dealing
with stuff like BBS's and Mailbox's and APRS for that
matter. The older PC/FlexNet (before the Flex32 days)
was alot more flexible (I think anyways) when it came
to building your system for multiple purposes.

What has surprised me in some ways (and not at all in
others) is the lack of applications based on Flex32. It
is after all a very easy API to work with, and I myself
have developed stuff for it.

Perhaps the authors of Flex32 had their sights on IP,
in other words perfecting the excellent Windows network
drivers so that you can do full IP via Flex32 drivers.

I really don't know, I'd like to hear other opinions
on that. Come to think of it, this group has been quite
lately, maybe we can get some interesting discussions
going again.

But getting back to your *dilemna* ... The only thing
that *might* be of interest is the OpenBCM project. I
thought I saw a blurb the other day regarding Flex32,
however it was in German, and the word *difficult* was
part of the dialogue :-(

If I may suggest, take a trip to www.google.com, and
search for BCM or OpenBCM along with Flex32 or FlexNet32
or similar and see what you can find.

I personally still use PC/FlexNet 3.3g on a 90 Mhz 486,
ram disk, boot from floppy (flash card would be nice),
running FlexDigi node with 3 ports (baycom board 145.07 mhz,
6PACK eprom Paccom tnc 145.01 mhz, and a serial KISS link
to my NOS development system), and Baycoms AWESOME BCM
1.40h mailbox/bbs software (compressed FBB forwarding)
running on top of it all. Uptimes easy into a month
or more (NO PROBLEM AT ALL).

Best regards,

Maiko Langelaar / VE4KLM