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At a hacker con we built a public cluster of terminals. One set of terminals was a bunch of 486's that net-booted a mini Linux distro with just a kernel and an
by throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
At a hacker con we built a public cluster of terminals. One set of terminals was a bunch of 486's that net-booted a mini Linux distro with just a kernel and an X client, connecting to a hardened X server.
I left a root prompt in one of the VTY's so people could mess around with it, but it being a net-booted BusyBox shell, there wasn't much to play with. We weren't concerned about MITM, because the network was token ring - in the mid 2000s. Convention full of hackers, and a bunch of machines with root shells open, but nobody hacked it, because nobody could get on the network.
We shipped all the gear up on an Amtrak from Florida to NYC. We had no budget nor interest in shipping them back or storing them, so we stacked them on the sidewalk and started yelling about free computers. In two hours they were gone.