Your first caller

The first person to log in should be you. This page logs you in on the computer itself, creates your sysop account, and then connects over the network as a caller would.

In PBDispatch choose Tools > Local Login…. A ProBoard window opens on the first free node. This is a local session, so it needs no network and no ports.

On a local logon you can press Enter at the name prompt instead of typing. ProBoard fills in the Sysop name you set in PBConfig. That only works when an account with that name exists, so create it first.

You have two ways to make the account. Use whichever you prefer.

In PBConfig. Open User Editor and click Insert. Fill in:

• Name: exactly your sysop name.
• Password: a strong one.
• Level: the highest level you use for the sysop. Look at Time / Download Limits to see the levels and their limits, and choose the sysop's level.

Click Save.

As a new caller. Log in at the console, or connect from PBTerm (below), and answer the new-user questions with your sysop name and a password. Then open the User Editor in PBConfig, find your account, and raise its Level to the sysop's level. Save.

Stop every node before you edit users in PBConfig, then start again. ProBoard rewrites a user's record at logoff and would undo your change.

Now log in again and walk through the board as a caller does: the logon screens, the main menu, the message areas, the file areas. Press / at a menu prompt and type a command word such as who or page. Anything that looks wrong can be changed in PBConfig.

Figure 1. PBTerm connected to a ProBoard system.

Use a terminal program to see the board the way callers do. PBTerm, in your install folder, is made for this.

1. Start PBTerm.exe. Its phonebook opens.
2. Add an entry. Set the host to localhost, the protocol to Telnet and the port to 23.
3. Choose ANSI as the terminal type.
4. Double-click the entry to call it.

You should see the same logon screens a caller sees. Log in with the account you made. In PBDispatch the dashboard now shows one caller on a node, with the address and how long they have been connected.

A caller first sees the Anti-Bot Detection screen (press ESC to continue; see Login Guard), then the name prompt.

You can also use any other Telnet client, or SSH or RLogin once you have turned those services on.

Open a second PBTerm window and call again. The dashboard shows two nodes in use. Each caller has a separate ProBoard.exe and a separate folder in NODEDIR.

Go on to Going online when you are ready for people outside your own computer.