[nos-bbs] Background JNOS operation

[George [Skip] VerDuin]

Greetings.

The next step at K8RRA is to encourage JNOS to live peacefully in the 
background.  A "headless" computer is the further target.  Using 
"screen" as a detachable/re-attachable link to gain access to the sysop 
console almost works nicely.  Also, jnos&screen seem to be just happy 
operating from a background process.

Here is an interaction between jnos--screen that is misbehaving.  When 
started as:
     ...# screen -d -m  jnos ...
the processes start up nicely and are happy until attaching for the 
*first time* with:
     ...# screen -r
Wherein jnos issues the message "NOS PANIC  Lost keyboard (-1/4)" 
followed by an automatic restart of jnos.  The second killer is that the 
restart initiates "tun1" rather than tun0 [for an unknown reason] which 
kills the link from the new instantiation of jnos and the OS -- Fedora 
in my case.  The "ifconfig" shows tun0 to be active and tun1 to be 
non-existant [another mystery].

The non-detached jnos startup is very normal when started with:
    ...# screen  jnos ...
In both this case, and with the "-d -m" startup above, the manual 
detach-then-reattach sequence  work nicely with no ill effects found 
here thus far...

SO -- the question I pose is "why the PANIC?".  The message originates 
from curses.c and I wonder why curses is bothered by attachment of the 
keyboard later than initial startup [but before the first character is 
typed].  Thus far, it seems to me I must revise the jnos code to 
suppress the panic, and perhaps fix the tun1/tun0 issue upon restart too.

The more interesting question is "Has anyone found a work-around for 
this problem to avoid revising jnos source?".

Cheers to all & 73.
Skip