How Lurch works

Lurch is an AT&T 3b1 with 1.5 megs of ram and 30 megs of diskspace running Unix SVR2.0.. It used to be 0.5 megs of ram, but a friend took pity on us. Lurch's most entertaining piece of hardware is a Voice Power card, which is designed to do voice mail, etc. There are quite a few PBXs floating around the world that are driven by 3b1s with Voice Power cards.

To answer the phone, there is a bourne shell script which counts the rings, and on the third one hands control to the vda program. The vda program then runs a bunch of script files (in vda language) which do the actual "Press 1 to leave a message for..." part. When vda returns, another shell script makes a directory of all the message directorys, and uucp's (uucp is a unix file transfer program) it over to mcbsd (the WWW server).

This was written by

tjohnson@cobber.cord.edu
If you have any comments/sugestions, let me know.

Leave us a message! The number is 218-299-4192.

Here is the vda man page.
Here is a tutorial for vda.
Here is a copy of the software. This is a direct copy of the software running on lurch. files with the :e:v extension are sound files. They have been truncated to protect the innocent. (:-)).

OBplea for hardware:

Today, (2-13-95) Lurch paniced from a hard drive timeout, but seemed to recover when I power-cycled him (so much for our uptime record (booted Nov 10, 1994)). If you have an old MFM hard drive that you arn't doing anything with, we would really appriciate it if you gave it to us. :-)