Ok first thing you'll want to do after making the changes 'detailed' in README.setup is to change to the 'src' directory and type 'make'. This should run smoothly. IF you get some message saying it can't find gcc, you can TRY changing CC = gcc in Makefile to CC = cc, but that is likely to barf on the code. IF all goes well type 'make install', this moves the programs into the 'bin' directory. There are two programs 'summink' (or whatever you changed it to in the Makefile) and 'angel'. 'summink' is the talker itself (the server) and this can be run as is, or you can run 'angel', it will put the server up, and put it up again if the server crashes for some reason. IF the sevrer keeps on crashing repeatedly in short periods of time, the angel will give up and quit. NOTE: If you change the name of the 'summink' program be sure to update the exec calls in angel.c (line 193).

Once you're up and running and have gotten the 'admin' character setup its a good idea to read through the files doc/admin.doc doc/advanced.doc and doc/basic.doc. These document all the SU/Admin commands, they can be read from within the talker (help admin, advanced or basic) but its easier to do it using your fave editor or more (or less if you have it) from the unix command line.

Also, for your own peace of mind, comment out the code in plists.c that looks like:

if (!strcmp("admin", p->lower_name)) {
p->residency = HCADMIN_INIT; }

In the supplied distribution this is lines 1022 to 1025. This is the code that creates the 'Admin' character and gives it the HARD CODED ADMIN privs. After you've created your own admin character and used 'Admin' to give IT Admin and HC Admin privs this piece of code can be a security risk (if the admin character gets deleted somehow, or if you're stupid enough to nuke it then name banish it). Its best to get rid of it.

A few things you need to know. If you want to bring the program down, don't forget to kill the angel first, otherwise it will just bounce straught back up *8-P.

Backups

Basically if the program receives a SIGUSR2 (i.e. kill -USR2 ) it does the backups. These are carried out by scripts specified in the do_backup() function at the end of glue.c, you should create appropriate ones called daily.backup.pt. where is 1 for a script that copies all the files in the players, notes, and rooms directories to somewhere safe. Example ones are supplied in which you can just change a few paths as appropriate, you may need to edit these a bit more than that though. Tar is the best way to do this. The second script compresses the tar file and moves it into an appropriate place with other daily backups. With the script as is 5 daily back ups are kept, the oldest one being discarded once you have

5. There is also a weekly backup script... For all of this to work there is an entry you should have in your crontab file, edit this using 'crontab -e', and add the following entry...

0 0 * /home/users/athan/summink/bin/trigger.backup

adjusting it as necessary for where you keep the files. This triggers the backups at midnight EVERY day. You will also want another line:-

5 0 0 /home/users/athan/summink/backup/weekly-backup

To trigger the weekly backups at 5 past midnight every sunday morning.

You can of course change the whole backup strategy to suit your tastes, the key thing is that s SIGUSR2 is sent to the process to get it to do the backups. Do NOT carry out backups any other way, you will end up with fargled files. The backup scripts are fairly well commented, so you shouldn't have a problem changing things to suit.