Wise men don't know how it feels to be thick as a brick


Ok, we've got ALLFIX set up enough to start tossing file echos and we've
set up a passworded account with our uplink and sent a request to his
AREAMgr program (ALLFIX or RAID) to be turned on to a few file echos
and we're now sitting around killing time, watching the screen, waiting
for new files to start pouring in.......................................
.......................go look at some dirty GIFs or something cause the
traffic in the file echos is not nearly as heavy as it is in the message
echos.  As a matter of fact the most consistent are the FIDO FDNs
(Nodediff, BACKBONE, FILEBONE, FIDONEWS) and they only come in once a
week!  I haven't seen anything on the PCB FDN in about a month.

While were waiting, let me mention that there are also FDN's that aren't
on the filebone.  One notable one is for Doom Wads.  inquire in the Doom
Echo as to how to get hooked up to it.  There are a lot of them like
that.  Just check around.

Wait...what's that...ALLLLRIIIIGHTTT! As you set there watching your
screen as your mailer polls your hub you suddenly see a bunch of little
*.zip and *.tic files being imported into your inbound directory.
You can hardly wait til the tosser finishes up so you can see it ALLFIX
is gonna work right (not to mention there's a bunch of new files to play
with).  Finally, the Tosser is through and as you watch in anticipation
....................................nothing happens.  Nothing at all.
doesn't it WORK!!

Simple.  We still have to run ALLFIX.  You gotta tell it to run.

There are several ways to do this. One is to exit the call waiting
screen and change to the ALLFIX directory and run ALLFIX F from the
command line.  Not very glamorous but it gets the job done.  But, we've
not gone to all the trouble of setting up allfix ( not to mention
mailers, tosser/scanners, PCBoard, a couple `o dozen PPEs and every
thing else) if we had wanted to do ANYTHING manually, now would we.

So, we've got to figure out a way to get PCBoard to trigger ALLFIX.
There are two ways to do this.

One is to set up and event to run allfix.  Just use PCBSETUP's event
editor to set one up to run whenever you want it to.  Use a batchfile
similar to this to run it...

@ECHO OFF
IF NOT EXIST C:\PCB\FIDO\IN\*.TIC GOTO END
CD C:\ALLFIX
ALLFIX F
IF "%INPCB%"=="Y" GOTO END
%PCBDRIVE%
CD %PCBDIR%

:END


If you've set up AllFix to announce files either in a local echo or by
sending netmail announcements then add the "A" switch to the ALLFIX
command so that it looks like this:

ALLFIX F A

The second way of triggering AllFix is to use the POSTCALL.BAT file.
For those of you not familiar with POSTCALL.BAT, every time PCBFido
completes a call (incoming or outgoing) it looks for the POSTCALL.BAT
file in the startup directory (the directory that contains BOARD.BAT)
and if it finds it there it runs it.  If it doesn't fine it it returns
to the call waiting screen.  So what you do is put those same lines that
you put in the event batchfile into you existing POSTCALL.BAT.  You can
leave out the lines If "%inpcb"==, %PCBDRIVE% and CD %PCBDIR% in the
postcall.bat.  If you don't have a POSTCALL.BAT use your favorite text
editor to create one with those lines.

If, like me, you are using QFront as a frontend just put the same lines
in your STARTER.BAT (again, leave out the three lines that deal with
returning to pcboard) in the :TossFido section.  Or you can set it up as
an event like we did with PCBFido.

If you've set up the File announcement business you'll now need to
rescan so that the announcements will be sent out.  If you are using
PCBFido then just set up to rescan in PCBSETUP | Fido Configuration |
Fido Configuration.

If you use QFront it's little trickier to get it to rescan.  You can
either wait for an event that has the SCAN flag set in it or wait for
an incoming mail transfer to trigger the scan.

Or you can use the semaphore flags that we've set AllFix up to create
(remember in the ASETUP | System Data | Global Options screen we set the
line Mailer rescan to Frontdoor This is why we set it that way.  PCBFido
users can change that line to none if they want)  What that setting does
is create a couple of semaphore files called FDRESCAN.NOW and
FMRESCAN.NOW.

If we were using frontdoor then we wouldn't have to do anything else.
But, since we're using QFront we have to make QScan recognize those
semaphores.  The way to do that is this:

Enter QFConfig | PROGRAM | SEMAPHORE FILES and make an entry with the
FDRESCAN.NOW file with an errorlevel that you aren't currently using in
your STARTER.BAT.  I used errorlevel 45 but it doesn't matter as long as
you aren't using it for something else.

While you're in QFConfig. look in PROGRAM | PROGRAM SETUP | SYSTEM
DIRECTORIES and make sure the Semaphore files line points to the main
QFront directory.

Also check in QFConfig | PROGRAM | GENERAL | MISCELLANEOUS FLAGS for the
line Semaphore check frequency.  It needs to be set for something
besides 0.  I use 180.  This makes a scan for semaphore files in the
main QFront directory every 3 min.

One more thing.  Go back into ASETUP | System Data | Pathnames (part 1)
and make sure the semaphore line points to your QFront main directory,
also.

Now edit your STARTER.BAT.

Add a line like this in with all the other errorlevel lines:

IF ERRORLEVEL 45 GOTO AFRESCAN

and then add this section:

:AFRESCAN
 cd \QFront
 QScan /CC:\QFront\Node1 /SCAN
 del c:\qfront\fmrescan.now
 goto start

Edit the QScan line so that it matches the same line in the TossFido
section of the starter.bat except use the /SCAN flag so that is just
scans for outgoing mail.  Doesn't really matter, just saves a little
time.
The line that deletes the fmrescan.now is there just for house cleaning.
Remember that I said that ALLFIX creates two files when it needs to tell
the Frontdoor to rescan. One tells Frontdoor to rescan the echo areas
and the other tells it to rescan the netmail area.  When QScan finds the
FDrescan.now semaphore it will delete it automatically after it does the
rescan.  Since it never looks for the FMrescan.now, that file is still
there.  This line deletes it.

Now, the next time a set of files comes in from one of the file echos,
Allfix should process them little devils. (Knock on wood).

Later,
Mark Elliott