See EDIT at bottom. The problem, as posted below, is SOLVED. (Though, I do have a new question.)

I'm new to this forum. This is my first post, so if I'm posting to the wrong channel, I apologize in advance.

I have my old Galacticomm MajorBBS v5.3 running in a dosbox. I've successfully installed dosbox and the bbs on two different computers, one running Windows 7, the other is a Linux distro. My primary focus is on the Linux distro.

What I'm trying to figure out now is how to either telnet into the bbs ... or, alternatively, ssh into my Linux system, and then connect to the BBS using a serial terminal program like minicom.

I have edited the ~/.dosbox/dosbox-0.73.conf file many times, trying a variety of things. But so far, I'm not having any success.

Here is what I've tried so far:

#serial1=directserial realport:COM1 doesn't work when I try to connect using minicom
#serial1=directserial realport:ttyS0 doesn't work when I try to connect using minicom
#serial1=nullmodem (by itself) doesn't work when I try to connect using minicom
#serial1=nullmodem telnet port:2023 doesn't work when I try telnet in. Telnet seems to connect to something, but I don't see anything on the client side, and I don't see any information being sent to the BBS on the BBS side.
#serial1=modem listenport:2023 doesn't work

Note that I am not interested in connecting TO the bbs from another dosbox session. I am only interested in connecting to the bbs from another computer using a native telnet/ssh client program (such as PuTTY).

If anyone can guide me in the right direction, I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks.

EDIT (see next EDIT also): After I posted this message, I continued experimenting and I stumbled on the solution (sort of). For some odd reason, telnet'ing into my BBS from my Linux distro was not working. Just for the heck of it, I decided to try telnet'ing in from my Windows 7 machine using PuTTY. I can't not imagine how this could possibly make a difference, but for some reason, PuTTY worked. (When I saw the BBS come up, my jaw hit the floor.)

This is the line I'm using in my dosbox configuration file now:

serial1=nullmodem port:2023

So that part works ... I'm happy, but I do have another question now.

When I open a telnet session to my BBS, if I am already logged in, the connection is refused. This BBS is capable of supporting up to 16 "lines". I assumed if I did this:

serial2=nullmodem port:2024
serial3=nullmodem port:2025
serial4=nullmodem port:2026

...that I would get 3 more lines. And I was right. But telnet'ing into the BBS using different port numbers, I'm able to connect to 4 different lines.

I tried serial5, serial6, and so on ... but that doesn't work.

So my question ... now ... is:

A.) Can I have more than 4 serial connections?

and

B.) Is there a way to have dosbox "ring" the next available port automatically? For example, if people are on ports 2023, 2024, and 2025 ... the next person who tries to telnet in is going to have 3 failed connections before finally getting through on port 2026.

In the old BBS days, you would give everyone 1 phone number for your BBS ... and the phone system would "hunt" all your available lines until it found one that was open. Without that ability, people would have to dial up to 16 different phone numbers to find an open line. (Or even more ... some BBS's has 50+ phone lines.)

EDIT 2 (January 19, 2012): I was brought back to this post after being notified that someone replied. I just wanted to update this message in case anyone ever runs across this. (Fairly unlikely, but whatever.)

After getting the above method to work, "serial1=nullmodem port:2023" and so on... I ran into some problems with that. After someone would connect, dosbox would not "release" that port until I shut down dosbox and reopened it.

Clearly that was unacceptable. You can imagine having to reboot your BBS every time someone calls in and hangs up. Not very practical.

Fortunately, I found a solution. (Or, rather, someone else told me what to do.)

The best solution for the MBBS (MajorBBS) that I'm running is this:

serial1=modem listenport:2023
serial2=modem listenport:2024
serial3=modem listenport:2025
serial4=modem listenport:2026

Then, in the BBS set up, I set the line type to modem (instead of nullmodem), and set the init string to "ATS0=1"

Now ... people are able to telnet in, hang up, and reconnect without any problems.

I'm still limited to 4 ports ... and I still don't know of a way to have it where if one port is busy, it will go to the next available port. The guy who replied mentioned synchronet, but I believe that is an entirely different BBS. The games I want to run only work with MajorBBS, so I can't simply choose a different BBS.