In light of the current economy BBSDown is now FREE!!

This is the FULL version, absolutely free!!

Ever open a web page only to see "Cannot find server or DNS error"??
Your customer has done this, probably to your website!
BBSDown gives you a simple solution to let your customers know "Hey, sites down for a few minutes, doing some maintenance".
It will display any text based web page or one image file you want to display to  your user to show them a simple message:

This webpage is down for maintenance, please try back by 9AM PST.

How many customers would see that and come back later simply because they were given the courtesy of a message informing them the site was down.
How many came from a search engine and simply hit their "Back" button because your site was down?

BBSDown was created back in 1995 for Sysop's of Bulletin Board Systems, and faded away due to the internet.
With a recent resurgence for the need to keep users informed I felt it was time to bring BBSDown from the archives.

Exactly what does it do?
BBSDown is a mini web server that serves out one page and/or one image depending on the request received.
So if your own website is down for code updates, or whatever reason - you can run BBSDown and it will answer browser requests, regardless of what they request.
The browser will ONLY receive your specified index.html page or the built in message, or an image file that informs them that the site is down temporarily for maintenance.
BBSDown also encompasses some additional security to help prevent in DOS attacks.

Revision  History
Supported Operating System
Main Screen
Options
SSL Options - N/A until licensed.
Optional settings
  --Using the built in HTML or JPEG. 
  --Specify own server IP for dual NIC machines
  --

 

Revision  History

v4.1 - multi-threaded for better throughput, added internal HTML and JPEG image to show to customer.
          More options, thread control, SSL support etc. Changed display screen for better visibility.
v4.0 - Initial release of web capable BBSDown
v1.0-3.3 Dos BBS modem only

SUPPORTED OPERATING SYSTEMS - Windows 2003 Server, Windows 2000 Server.
I would LIKE to say you can use this on XP as I have tested it on XP, however - Windows XP Pro only permits 10 concurrent connections to a "shared" PC.
If your site is small, sure, go ahead but you only get 10 inbound connections - so any other PC's on your network may count if you are sharing anything or running any other server application

MAIN Screen

The main screen is more of a status window to let you know everything is working.
The robotic eye was carried over from BBSDown 3.3 as a program status.
The white textbox will display the last connected user.
Menu options are:

Exit - Exit the application
View - Logfile - will show a logfile of all connected users, to include their IP address, referer, user agent, port connected.
This is in W3C Extended Log File Format.
View - Options - will bring up options (See below).
Help - Help and Help About - self explanatory.
The status bar will display the status of stunnel starting/stopping when SSL is configured and used.

 

OPTIONS

Show splash screen - Disable the startup splash screen
Stay on Top - BBDown will stay on top of all other applications so it can be monitored.
Run in System  Tray - hide the icon in the system tray not on the taskbar.
Start With Windows - the application will start when you log into Windows - this is not a SERVICE and will not automatically start without a login.


TCP Options -
Port number, this is the NON SSL port that BBSDown will accept incoming requests on, generally port 80 or backup port 8080, sometimes 7778.
Connection Timeout - BBSDOwn will drop the connection if not connected within x seconds.
Maximum Concurrent connections - Bandwidth throttling, if 100 people concurrently connect it will pause until a thread is freed up, adjust this based on the horsepower of your server.

File to display to user: - This is a general text based html file, it is merely sent to the user whether it's text, xml, html etc -
ANY TEXT REQUEST, such as CGI, PHP, JS, SQL, EXE, will be sent this file.
IF THIS FILE is not there, BBSDown has the fresh installed index.html built in and WILL still send a "Down" message to inform users with a customizable string in that page.
(Optional setting, see Optional settings for more information)
Image File to display to user:  - This will display an image file in the event a request for an image (JPG, PNG, or GIF) is requested. This image can be any browser supported image.

Would you rather have a user see this:

Or this:

 

Here is a sample taken from a public website I own, I took down my private website and put BBSDown in it's place - an image I had displayed is now showing as BBSDown!

 

SSL Options

Without giving a class on SSL, you either know what you need to do or not -
BBSDown uses sTunnel as an SSL wrapper, however it is limited to using PEM type certificates.
If you DO NOT HAVE a PEM type certificate we can fix that!

If you have requested and installed a certificate onto a Windows server using the IIS certificate wizard, you can export that certificate with its private key to a PFX file. In order to import this certificate onto the Access Gateway, you must convert the PFX file to the unencrypted PEM format.
Use the open-source utility OpenSSL to perform the conversion from PFX to PEM. You can download a Win32 distribution of OpenSSL here:
http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/openssl.htm

To convert a PFX file to a PEM file, follow these steps on a Windows machine:
1. Download and install the Win32 OpenSSL package from http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/openssl.htm.
2. Create a folder c:\certs and copy the file yourcert.pfx into the c:\certs folder
3. Open a command prompt and change into the GnuWin32\bin directory:
cd %ProgramFiles%\GnuWin32\bin

4. Type the following command to convert the PFX file to an unencrypted PEM file (all on one line):
openssl pkcs12 -in c:\certs\yourcert.pfx -out c:\certs\cag.pem -nodes
5. When prompted for the import password, enter the password you used when exporting the certificate to a PFX file. You should receive a message that says MAC verified OK.

 

OPTIONAL Settings:

If you do not want to run an index.html page you can delete the index.html file and add an entry into the Ini File (BBSDown.ini)
and it will be displayed IN a default web string embedded from BBSDown in a default html page
To do this add this string under [Options]

BBSDownString=This site temporarily down, standbye...(Or a message of your choice)
If you do not have a  JPEG, GIF, or other type of image  you can always use the default installed JPEG, which is also embedded inside of BBSDown.
Either way a request for a JPEG, GIF, or PNG will always be answered.

If you havce a Dual NIC server and want to Set BBSDown to listen to a specific NIC then add this entry under [Options]
ServerIP=XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX    Where X's represent your IP address.
 

If you already have sTunnel installed, you can add a value to point BBSDown to this location, although BBSDown does check it's registry setting for it's location this overrides that setting:

Under [SSL]
sTunnelLocation={stunnel location}  (ie C:\sTunnel)

 

 

BBSDown! v4.2
Copyright © 1995-2008
Computer Creations Software