SDF Public Access Unix System

https://sdf.org/?ssh

by neehao • 3 months ago

173 90 3 months ago

sdf.org

jbaber2• 3 months ago

Still going strong. I started there when they were still on DEC alphas.

"this page was generated using ksh, sed and awk"

user3939382• 3 months ago

I love SDF. Super reliable and awesome community.

jbaber2• 3 months ago

A great webhost, too. You can log in and edit html/index.html directly or scp stuff up.

bombcar3• 3 months ago

I still use ~/public_html even for users that will never ever login. Loved that feature.

mackeye• 3 months ago

just 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• 3 months ago

Previously...

SDF Public Access Unix System - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32340635 - Aug 2022 (29 comments)

SDF Public Access Unix System - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31076886 - April 2022 (46 comments)

SDF Public Access Unix System - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14940790 - Aug 2017 (29 comments)

SDF – Public Access Unix System - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14134798 - April 2017 (51 comments)

seblon3• 3 months ago

I 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• 3 months ago

Definitely 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• 3 months ago

Don'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• 3 months 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".

bayindirh4• 3 months ago

You shall wait. It's a volunteer powered system and while the ops are silent and terse in their mails, they're nice people.

Their plate is already quite full and they operate a whole universe of services, so cut them some slack.

It's not an ordinary service which is exposed to internet trying to turn a profit. They run SDF, two Mastodon instances, a mail server, a Git server, trying to salvage/keep alive living computer museum (SDF Vintage Systems), etc. etc.

bezier-curve• 3 months ago

I get that it's a volunteer system, but having donated for 2 years to help support their Lemmy instance, it's frustrating it's been down for 2 weeks without much of an update, just a hint "there's a good chance" it will come back. To me that seems lacking of transparency, not terse. How much disk space is it using? Maybe others in the community could help? How can they if they don't respond to emails? It was a nice thing while it lasted, but for federated social media, that kind of downtime hurts communities the most.

dwedge2• 3 months ago

I tried signing up to their mastodon three times and just never received the email accepting me. It's a shame because I wanted to be part of their community

aboardRat4• 3 months ago

I think you should create some visible but harmless nuisance using this shell escape, so that it's likely to get noticed, but doesn't damage anyone's valuable data.

Perhaps just run "bash -c 'stress --cpu 64 ; echo fix your shell escape'"l " or something like that.

bayindirh4• 3 months ago

Well, ruining everyone's day on that particular host is not a nice way to "bring this to attention".

If I ever experienced something like that, I'd be banning the person (or limiting their resources drastically) for 60 to 90 days to bring the impact of this matter to their attention.

Anything affecting users on a system is not harmless.

yashasolutions• 3 months ago

Creating a nuisance is not a good way to go about it.

Some security practices sometimes feels like someone stabbing you just to prove you could be stabbed. Then they point at the wound and say: "See? You should be more careful."

Yes, the risk is real, but creating harm to demonstrate it isnt the same as protecting people.

anthk2• 3 months ago

I did it too but TBH as I used small tools such as tcc, jimsh, eforth+muxleq, sacc, smu, catpoint+pointtools, compilers from https://t3x.org... I didn't care a lot on the rest, I'm pretty happy with my current account.

You can do a lot with S9 Scheme and the Unix API/syscalls it supports.

pratyahava2• 3 months ago

maybe try to fix it for them as soon as you have the root access?

seblon3• 3 months ago

Shell escape != Unix account escape :-)

justsomehnguy• 3 months ago

Just leave a note in root's motd.

glitchc• 3 months ago

Can you share more detail on the exploit itself? Does the shell escape give you access to programs that require a paid account, or does the shell escape give you root access?

seblon3• 3 months ago

When escaping, you can invoke custom commands and binaries. If a tool is not available, just place them (mail yourself there, use zmodem, ...), via chmod. But you have a disk quota of 20mb, so you're limited as unverified account.

But the whole thing is: if you can escape as non verified user, than you can mass automate it to do ddos etc...

jaypatelani• 3 months ago

Yesterday was NetBSD's 33rd Birthday. Nice time to share it :)

bombcar3• 3 months ago

That’s an awful lot of birthdays for something Netcraft confirmed dead 20 years ago …

hsnewman• 3 months ago

I've been on it forever, it's such a great resource

asimovDev• 3 months ago

Named 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• 3 months ago

I 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• 3 months ago

Thank 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 :)

CursedSilicon2• 3 months ago

I'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• 3 months ago

Likewise, iirc @ VCF in MV 2005.

buildbot2• 3 months ago

TIL there’s such a thing in Seattle! That’s very good to know!

CursedSilicon2• 3 months ago

We're actually hosting it in just under two weeks! Free event, but donations to SDF are appreciated

https://vcfpnw.org/

(Disclaimer: I'm an exhibitor. So I'd love more attendees!)

incanus77• 3 months ago

I 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• 3 months ago

Finally 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• 3 months ago

I'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.

mghackerlady9• 3 months ago

I 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

fleeno2• 3 months ago

I had access to a VMS system in my BBS days, and I had no idea it wasn't just some hard to use BBS software. When it clicked that it was a real operating system on a giant machine (I believe 11/380) it changed everything for me!

Suzuran4• 3 months ago

There was no 11/380 but there was an 11/780.

icedchai4• 3 months ago

I have a VMS system running under simh! I also have an actual AlphaServer (DS10) running OpenVMS but it's very loud so I don't turn it on often.

mghackerlady9• 3 months ago

the VMS shell had so many good ideas. If i ever write a shell, I'm including VMS style abbreviations. If there is any modern POSIX shell that implements such a feature, let me know, because if there isn't I have to write one

kstrauser• 3 months ago

Not quite the same, but fish shell has programmable abbreviations. I type “tf<space>” and it expands that inline to “opentofu”. It use to say “terraform” before we upgraded; I didn’t even have to change the commands I type.

ratxue• 3 months ago

check out decuserve.org for more vms

pestle• 3 months ago

I 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.

bombcar3• 3 months ago

In the 90s and even into the 2000s getting an email account that had shell access was really nice; there were things you could do that would have been hard to do locally.

It’s much less needed now.

trbleclef• 3 months ago

But where am I gonna run my eggdrop bot??

dharmatech• 3 months ago

Their section on Plan 9:

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

exitnode• 3 months ago

I wrote a bit on the SDF if you are interested: https://rz01.org/sdf/

trashb• 3 months ago

SDF 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• 3 months ago

I 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 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.

hanslub423• 3 months 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/) 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• 3 months ago

Wow! 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• 3 months 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).

mghackerlady9• 3 months ago

one of these days, I want to buy:

a powerpc xserve (running OSX server)

a sparc box (on solaris)

an alpha box (on either VMS or Digital Unix)

a pa-risc box (hp-ux)

a modern power box (Rocky or AIX)

an itanium box (running either VMS or NT depending on what the alpha is running)

a pi cluster (plan 9)

and a commodity x86 server (running OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Debian, Hurd, Redox, Serenity, reactos, and AROS).

and make a MOAP (mother of all pubnixes). if anyone has any hardware they'd like to donate, get in contact :)

electroly• 3 months ago

I'm curious, do you know which virtual machines (i.e. what emulator and what OS) you would want? Does the software exist and it's just a matter of the time to set it up? Or is it harder to get ahold of all the necessary old software (even if you have the emulator)?

Maybe in the modern age someone could make a "polarhome in a box" that offers a similar gamut of systems, but via preconfigured emulators that you can simply download and run.

assimpleaspossi• 3 months ago

At least you're running something with direct and real Unix roots.

NoSalt• 3 months ago

"It is pretty pointless, nobody needs or wants a unix shell account in this day and age."

This is not true at all. I have been a member of SDF for over 15 years now and I use it all the time. Most recently, when HostPapa tried to tell me my sftp issue was on my end, and I told them that I was able to recreate the problem from the west coast and the east coast; my home on the east coast and SDF on the west coast. Finally they listened and fixed my issue ... that was on THEIR side, not mine. I like having the ability to compute from different parts of the country, as it lets me do things like that.

vjay15• 3 months ago

Omg, we can access even ancient OSes, this is amazing!

anthk2• 3 months ago

I miss Jynx from SDF, he will be missed, btw.

miggol• 3 months ago

From 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• 3 months ago

The original Raspberry Pi had a 24 GFLOPS GPU for comparison.

buildbot2• 3 months ago

SDF 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) 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_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.

pailingems• 3 months ago

Longtime 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

whalesalad• 3 months ago

anyone remember silence is defeat? looks like the domain was donated to SDF.

kls0e• 3 months ago

Excellent 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. :-)

SDF Public Access Unix System

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