Once upon a time I ran a large interactive telnet service (a campus wide information system) that one could run gopher from and connect to various library onlin

Once upon a time I ran a large interactive telnet service (a campus wide information system) that one could run gopher from and connect to various library online public access catalogs and wide area information systems servers. You would telnet to these BSDi boxes from the campus network anonymous and select services from a menu. We had a special custom hardened shell for this. Originally it was some script that ran from sh; but the campus network of the 90s was pretty adversarial system and it was too easy to bust out of the shell. Even with the hardened shell, we booted from a read only network drive. When we shut it down for about a year it displayed my phone number. I had some interesting calls from old faculty and researchers. Anyway, I would not give a full shell to randos from the Internet. (Sorry, I replied at the wrong level, but this web view won’t let my copy this message)