The Standard Client

Last modified: Tue Jun 29 12:08:12 GMT 1999

Introduction

The standard client program is written in perl and lives in /spider/perl/client.pl. It performs the interface function between the cluster daemon (/spider/perl/cluster.pl) and AX25 or Telnet connections, both incoming and outgoing.

There is a related program called /spider/perl/console.pl which, as of version 1.30, is the standard sysop or full duplex telnet user connected interface program. This is a simple screen oriented program that has a bash or shell like command history editing facility as well as a scrolling cluster window with colouration of particular lines of interest (such as DX spots, Announces etc).

client.pl

The client itself is a rather rudimentary program which really only deals with things like line end conventions and noticing when a connection goes away. It is envisaged that at some time in the nearish future this program will be written in C and thus become considerably smaller. But, for the moment and whilst this area is under some development, it will remain in perl for ease of change.

The client can take up two arguments: a "callsign" and a connection type.

The "callsign" can have the following values:-

A real callsign (!).
For incoming connections it is important to make sure that the callsign passed DOES NOT have an SSID (use the %u or %U in ax25d.conf). The DXSpider system largely ignores what it regards as 'duplicate' callsigns (and that includes those with SSIDs) except in certain special cases.
The name of a connect script.
login This will cause a unix like login: and password: phase to be run. With version 1.13 the password isn't checked unless there is a password recorded in the user file - but you have no means of recording a password! (unless you have created a local set/password command - please donate a copy it you have)
Also in 1.13 only existing users can enter via this means. This will probably change, but please discuss this in the support mailing list.

The connection type can be:-

ax25 This tells the client to use ax25 line conventions.
telnet This tells the client to use normal unix line conventions.
connect Start an outgoing connect script. Use the line conventions in that script.

The connection type can be missing in which case the default is unix line conventions.

If both the callsign and the connection are missing then it is assumed that the client is the sysop and uses the callsign set in your local copy of DXVars.pm.

Considerations

As mentioned earlier, SSIDs are generally stripped from callsigns except in two cases:

For Cluster node callsigns. Although here in the UK we are issued with special callsigns to run cluster nodes and BBSs, this is not universal. Therefore by marking a callsign as a node you disable SSID checking. You will have to treat incoming cluster callsigns specially in ax25d.conf to use this feature (i.e you will have to set up a line specially for that callsign with a %s or %S for the callsign substitution [better just put the callsign you want!]).
The sysop callsign set up in your local copy of DXVars.pm. You must call client.pl with no parameters for this to work.

Files

The client only uses files when in the login phase. It prints the /spider/data/issue file, if it is present, to the user before issuing the login: prompt. After a callsign and password is entered it uses the standard cluster user file to check them.

Having said all of that the client appears to use the following files and sends them to the user if they are present:-

/spider/data/motd which is sent to the user on normal user startup.
/spider/data/logout which is sent to user on disconnection.
/spider/data/offline which is sent to the user if the cluster daemon isn't running.