Live O·M·N·I Ping Server

Register Your O·M·N·I BBS

The restored O·M·N·I Ping Server at o-m-n-i.com is available free of charge to operators of O·M·N·I BBS systems. Once registered, your O·M·N·I Server can send its original periodic pings to our Ping Server, allowing your BBS’s current online status to appear automatically in the directory above.

To register your BBS, send the following information to sysop [at] o-m-n-i [dot] com:

• Desired site code (up to 16 characters, alphanumeric characters only, no spaces or punctuation)
• BBS name
• Sysop’s name
• Sysop’s e-mail address
• BBS web home page URL
• BBS connection hostname or public IP address
• Single-paragraph description of your BBS

Your site code is used by the Ping Server to identify your O·M·N·I Server and will not be displayed in the public directory. Once your registration has been completed, you will receive the information needed to configure O·M·N·I Server to send pings to the restored Ping Server.

If you have any questions about the service, send an e-mail message to sysop [at] o-m-n-i [dot] com.

How the O·M·N·I Ping Server Works

The O·M·N·I Ping Server was originally designed to make it possible to operate an O·M·N·I BBS on the Internet without having a fixed IP address. This was particularly useful in the 1990s, when many BBS operators connected to the Internet using dial-up accounts and received a different IP address each time they connected.

An O·M·N·I Server periodically sent a ping containing its current IP address and a unique site code to the Ping Server. The Ping Server recorded the address and used the periodic pings to determine whether the BBS was online.

Each registered BBS was assigned a site code that uniquely identified it. Originally, this site code also provided the BBS with a fixed O·M·N·I Internet address. For example, a BBS with the site code MyBBS could advertise the address [email protected], even though its actual IP address might change each time it connected to the Internet.

How It Works Today

The restored O·M·N·I Ping Server at o-m-n-i.com continues to accept the original ping messages generated by O·M·N·I Server software. The original protocol is therefore still being used by the software exactly as intended to report that a BBS is online.

What has changed is how the BBS’s connection address is determined.

Modern Internet connections commonly operate behind routers, firewalls, Network Address Translation (NAT), virtual machines, and other networking layers. As a result, the IP address reported by an O·M·N·I Server may be a private address that cannot be reached from the Internet. Likewise, the Internet address from which the Ping Server receives the ping may belong to a router or gateway rather than to the BBS itself.

For this reason, the restored Ping Server uses the original O·M·N·I pings to determine whether a registered BBS is online, but it does not use the IP address contained in the ping to determine where users should connect. Instead, each registered BBS supplies a public hostname or IP address through which users can reach the system.

This preserves the original O·M·N·I heartbeat mechanism while allowing it to function reliably on today’s Internet.

Site codes also remain part of the original protocol and are still used internally to identify registered O·M·N·I Servers. They are not published in the public directory because the original protocol predates modern authentication methods. Keeping site codes private helps prevent someone from submitting a false heartbeat on behalf of another registered BBS.