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SDF Public Access Unix System
- jbaber 6mo agoStill going strong. I started there when they were still on DEC alphas. "this page was generated using ksh, sed and awk"
- user3939382 6mo agoI love SDF. Super reliable and awesome community.
- jbaber 6mo agoA great webhost, too. You can log in and edit html/index.html directly or scp stuff up.
- bombcar 6mo agoI still use ~/public_html even for users that will never ever login. Loved that feature.
- mackeye 6mo agojust got my stickers from there yesterday! :-) i wish my less cs-oriented friends could see how cool i think the sdf is, lol; and, that some kind of "small-web" system, complete with the self-expression the sdf offers via web-hosting, a radio station(!), etc., was accessible to more people (not at the fault of anyone; just that there's a lot to the internet that most people will never see). :>
- tomhow 6mo agoPreviously... SDF Public Access Unix System - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32340635 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32340635 - Aug 2022 (29 comments) SDF Public Access Unix System - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31076886 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31076886 - April 2022 (46 comments) SDF Public Access Unix System - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14940790 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14940790 - Aug 2017 (29 comments) SDF – Public Access Unix System - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14134798 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14134798 - April 2017 (51 comments)
- seblon 6mo agoI found a way to escape their shell (so you can run whatever you want), if you're not verified, it involves multiple steps to archive this. I mailed them 2x to their membership address, but since today no reaction. I asked also in their IRC. Just a question to HN: should I wait more, try again? Or should I simply publish the vulnerabilities somewhere? If yes, where? It's my first time that I found a vulnerability at my own, not sure how to deal with that.
- nabogh 6mo agoDefinitely wait at least a few months if you've not already. There are legal risks with these kinds of things and some orgs move slowly.
- zorked 6mo agoDon't publish. You already notified them, your shell escape isn't a big deal, publishing it will only be a pain for the volunteers running the service.
- TacticalCoder 6mo ago> your shell escape isn't a big deal You can't have it both ways: if it's not a big deal, then he can publish it. If you say "Don't publish", then you acknowledge that it's a big deal. I say to GP: "Congrats for finding a shell escape, it's always a big deal. But don't publish it... Yet". Give them a chance to fix it. But it they don't even answer to the emails, even just saying: "thx we're busy we can't fix right now but will do", then at some point you just publish. It doesn't take long to answer an email saying "thanks, we'll fix it eventually".
- Suzuran 6mo ago"We'll fix it eventually" is not good enough. If a human can find a flaw, then a bot can find the same flaw, and the bots are always watching and always testing. If someone can't commit to immediate security response when running a public-facing internet service then they should not be running that service, because the rest of the internet will not forgive them when their machine gets popped and becomes everyone else's problem. If they can't commit to a hard timeline of less than a few days, then publish. What happens next is not your fault - it was inevitable anyway. Edit for clarity: This is just in general, not specifically SDF or small orgs or large orgs. The internet does not care about the difference. The internet just does not care period. Nobody is going to give anyone else any breaks, and especially not a botnet.
- jaypatelani 6mo agoYesterday was NetBSD's 33rd Birthday. Nice time to share it :)
- bombcar 6mo agoThat’s an awful lot of birthdays for something Netcraft confirmed dead 20 years ago …
- hsnewman 6mo agoI've been on it forever, it's such a great resource
- asimovDev 6mo agoNamed after the Super Dimension Fortress from the Macross anime series. If you like mecha i recommend checking out the original series (it might look dated in some regards but still worth a watch. And the Do You Remember Love is a must watch after you finished the series, a grandiose animated spectacle, one of the most impressive animated films I've seen) If you are not feeling like watching a long series, I recommend checking out Macross Plus, from the author of Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo The series is known as Robotech in the USA. The original series is not available legally in the USA to my knowledge but should be available on Japanese blu rays with english subtitles or on your favorite Linux ISO sharing website. The rest of the entries are on Disney+ or the aforementioned websites.
- lizknope 6mo agoI first saw it when I was 10 in 1985 and it changed my life. I never knew that "cartoons" could be so serious. Lisa Hayes was such an incredible character. I didn't really know what anime was until I went to college and then I learned what Robotech really was and how it was created.
- 0x264 6mo agoThank you for mentioning those! I saw both Robotech and Macross Plus (in French) when I was a teenager. I still think about the SDF more often I would admit and the soundtrack is a regular occurrence in my work playlist :)
- CursedSilicon 6mo agoI've been fortunate enough to know Stephen Jones of SDF through his running of the local Seattle retro computing event (now rebranded as VCF PNW) He's an absolutely kind soul who is deeply interested in all kinds of retro projects. I wish there were more folks like him in tech generally
- iszomer 6mo agoLikewise, iirc @ VCF in MV 2005.
- buildbot 6mo agoTIL there’s such a thing in Seattle! That’s very good to know!
- CursedSilicon 6mo agoWe're actually hosting it in just under two weeks! Free event, but donations to SDF are appreciated https://vcfpnw.org/ https://vcfpnw.org/ (Disclaimer: I'm an exhibitor. So I'd love more attendees!)
- incanus77 6mo agoI recently joined ICM and was in Seattle (from Portland) for another event and pinged him about maybe, possibly getting let in to see things on a random Saturday — I’d stay out of the way, not touch anything, and at least see what’s going on there. Despite him preparing for the Portland Retro Gaming Expo, he spent an hour and a half with me, showing me around the place in detail. We booted up micros, we looked through books, we talked about decades of UNIX history, and we even played Spacewar on original hardware. What a generous curator.
- kristopolous 6mo agoFinally got to log into a vms system! I was looking to do that over 20 years ago but never could find one. Somehow I still remembered most of the shell syntax in a book I read about it probably in 2001. Don't ask me ... I don't know how either. Got bored in about 10 minutes but still, another box checked off!
- avhception 6mo agoI've only ever read about VMS in an historic context, like Wikipedia articles and blog posts. DEC and VMS are not well known. That's a shame, considering how much influence they had, especially on WinNT.
- mghackerlady 6mo agoI don't know about VMS specifically (more people will just know it as the thing the VAX runs), but DEC is very well known to anyone in the computer space. The PDP series brought us Unix and GNU, and the VAX was the only mainframe capable of competing with IBM. DEC was the largest terminal manufacturer (they made the vt100 and vt220. if you've ever run a terminal emulator, chances are it's emulating one of those or a machine that did). They created CP/M (and by extension DOS). DEC is very well known
- icedchai 6mo agoCP/M was created by Digital Research, a completely different company. There is no direct relation to DEC (Digital Equipment Corp.)
- mghackerlady 6mo agowell nevermind
- icedchai 6mo agoEven without CP/M, DEC still had incredible influence! The first multi-user system I used was a VAX, back in the late 80's.
- adaptit 6mo ago[dead]
- pestle 6mo agoI had an account there years ago but never really saw the point. I was already SSHing in from a shell, just to end up at another, different one. Kind of whimsical I guess, but ultimately of scant practical use.
- dharmatech 6mo agoTheir section on Plan 9: https://sdf.org/plan9/ https://sdf.org/plan9/ Side note: here's my workflow for running Plan 9 on Windows: https://youtu.be/IzEa2L_Pgw0?si=unM5l2-_i_g-NYKP https://youtu.be/IzEa2L_Pgw0?si=unM5l2-_i_g-NYKP
- exitnode 6mo agoI wrote a bit on the SDF if you are interested: https://rz01.org/sdf/ https://rz01.org/sdf/
- trashb 6mo agoSDF is cool, I commend their efforts of keeping a pub unix going! To me it feels like a stronghold of the "old school" web, similar to certain builtin board systems. I regularly visit and enjoy reading the phlogs of their members as well.
- somat 6mo agoI run a public unix(openbsd) shell for fun, I call it my social network platform it sort of sucks, no users, ip6 only, a bunch of vm's on an old underpowered router running in my closet. But feel free to stop by and set up a .plan if you have nothing better to do. ssh to applicant@register.public.outband.net instructions at https://www.public.outband.net https://www.public.outband.net note that it's ip6 only. It is pretty pointless, nobody needs or wants a unix shell account in this day and age. But I had fun setting it up, it started as an exercise to see what a shared multiuser postgres install would look like and got a little out of control. My current project is getting a rack of raspberry pi's(6 of them in a cute little case) hooked in as physical application nodes.
- hanslub42 6mo ago> nobody needs or wants a unix shell account in this day and age I do. But I do not need just any Unix shell account, I need old and weird ones! I develop and maintain a portable utility (rlwrap) that is aimed at users of older software, who are often also using older or even obsolete systems. For years, I used Polarhome (http://www.polarhome.com/ http://www.polarhome.com/) as a "dinosaur zoo" of obsolete systems (thans, Zoltan!) For every new release, building it on a creaky Solaris or HP-UX machine would expose a few bugs. Because older systems are being replaced by (much more uniform) newer ones, there is a diminishing need for such extreme portability. This is also the reason that Polarhome closed in 2022. In spite of this, testing on many different systems improves general code quality, even for users of mainstream systems like linux, BSD or OSX. Of course, I could setup a couple of virtual machines, but that is a lot of hassle, especially for machines with uncommon processor architectures.
- sureglymop 6mo agoWow! I hope you know you are having a real impact in the world. Rlwrap has made my life easier so many times, it's in my top 3 most useful CLI tools. Thank you :)
- rlonstein 6mo ago> nobody needs or wants a unix shell account in this day and age > I do. But I do not need just any Unix shell account, I need old and weird ones! I develop and maintain a portable utility (rlwrap) that is aimed at users of older software Thank you, personally. I've used it in several contexts not just old systems, for example rlwrap is recommended with Clojure (okay, perhaps that's a comparatively small audience).
- vjay15 6mo agoOmg, we can access even ancient OSes, this is amazing!
- anthk 6mo agoI miss Jynx from SDF, he will be missed, btw.
- miggol 6mo agoFrom the FAQ: "What is SDF" > While we did initially start out on a single computer in 1987, the > SDF is now a network of 8 64bit enterprise class servers running > NetBSD realising a combined processing power of over 21.1 GFLOPS! Which piqued my interest about how that compares to today's computers. nVidia's venerable 1080Ti from 2017 measures about 11300 GFLOPS, or 11.3 teraFLOPS. About a fifty times increase.
- Narishma 6mo agoThe original Raspberry Pi had a 24 GFLOPS GPU for comparison.
- buildbot 6mo agoSDF inspired me to start setting up my own retro computing lab for fun; to experiment with actual working history is very entertaining! Since SDF mostly has older systems (https://wiki.sdf.org/doku.php?id=vintage_systems:start https://wiki.sdf.org/doku.php?id=vintage_systems:start) I tried to get the later ones - Sparc M10, M7 & Ultrasparc, HP-C9000, etc. Very cool how they tried to move and preserve many of the living computer museum’s computers before Paul Allens sister could sell them all off. https://wiki.sdf.org/doku.php?id=vintage_systems:lcml_collection https://wiki.sdf.org/doku.php?id=vintage_systems:lcml_collec... I remember seeing the TOAD systems when I visited in 2016 long before they closed, it’s very sad that people no longer get to experience computer history in person the same way.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- pailingems 6mo agoLongtime SDF user. I have one of their 30th anniversary stickers on my Dell laptop. It's the only sticker I have deemed cool enough to have ever had, on any laptop. https://sdf.org/store/?3;sdf41 https://sdf.org/store/?3;sdf41
- whalesalad 6mo agoanyone remember silence is defeat? looks like the domain was donated to SDF.
- kls0e 6mo agoExcellent Pubnix! I just wish SDF would fix their LE-SSL for validated accounts. I ran mkhomepg -p and -a a week ago and the SSL cert delivered with my sdf subdomain still is for rie.sdf.org. I‘m just gonna be patient. :-)