SDF Public Access Unix System(sdf.org)
sdf.org
SDF Public Access Unix System
https://sdf.org
46 comments
I guess if you have a recurring need for it you might be able to contact them to have access to some system on demands or a scheduled windows. In the last news it says the following:
"The system will be up from time to time to help open source development - but it is closed to the public."
"The system will be up from time to time to help open source development - but it is closed to the public."
Are you interested in teaming up to build one?
I've been meaning to write a tremendous header for compiler & compiler version identification.
I've been meaning to write a tremendous header for compiler & compiler version identification.
I'm really horrible at hardware, so...
> I've been meaning to write a tremendous header for compiler & compiler version identification.
I doubt whether a "OS zoo" would be of great help for this - many old OSes can run a modern gcc; it is the system calls and terminal/pty/streams behaviours that can be very different (QNX is a great example of this)
Moreover (cf. the great musl preprocessor debate (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31067059) - for me as a "portable programmer" this kind of macro is rather less useful (though sometimes useful as a quick fix) than testing for individual features, as that will make the program compile and work on future, or unknown ancient architectures/compilers (at least in theory....)
> I've been meaning to write a tremendous header for compiler & compiler version identification.
I doubt whether a "OS zoo" would be of great help for this - many old OSes can run a modern gcc; it is the system calls and terminal/pty/streams behaviours that can be very different (QNX is a great example of this)
Moreover (cf. the great musl preprocessor debate (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31067059) - for me as a "portable programmer" this kind of macro is rather less useful (though sometimes useful as a quick fix) than testing for individual features, as that will make the program compile and work on future, or unknown ancient architectures/compilers (at least in theory....)
You are the developer if rlwrap? Thank you for that!
It's a truly special place.
I've had e-mail and a web presence since 2000 because of sdf.org. Long before I would have understood anything about setting up my own server.
And I learned much of my core unix knowledge there.
I've had e-mail and a web presence since 2000 because of sdf.org. Long before I would have understood anything about setting up my own server.
And I learned much of my core unix knowledge there.
For anyone interested in the multiuser aspect, the main "sdf" NetBSD host has 73 logins at the moment, "faeroes" has 46, and there are a handful of other systems on the network for interactive use like norge, the Linux MetaArray, etc. depending on membership type. The BSD hosts share storage via NFS.
One time my website was running rather slowly - I checked it out with top and found another user had runaway python processes using tens of gigs of RAM and pegging the CPUs. The solution was straightforward: I emailed them on the local mailer. A couple of hours later I received an apologetic reply and everything was working nicely again. :)
One time my website was running rather slowly - I checked it out with top and found another user had runaway python processes using tens of gigs of RAM and pegging the CPUs. The solution was straightforward: I emailed them on the local mailer. A couple of hours later I received an apologetic reply and everything was working nicely again. :)
Amazing how political these things don’t have to be.
When I was at university someone logged into the Sun workstation I was on to run a remote X session. Whatever they were doing kept puking all over the framebuffer console in the middle of my Cadence session. I send an actual polite email asking them to stop as it was making it difficult for me to draw gates. Got no reply.
Two days later I got hauled in front of my tutor, accused of hacking and being rude to the guy. I suspect I was just logged into the X session on the box and the person I complained about was doing what was supposed to have gone on. I defended this religiously but had to deal with a written warning from the university anyway and the tutor actively tried to compromise my course afterwards.
That’s the day I learned about politics. And unix. Digging into the forensics and causality of this led to a long career as a sysadmin and programmer and not designing chips. And not a decade of poor pay or unemployment like my course peers. So no regrets.
When I was at university someone logged into the Sun workstation I was on to run a remote X session. Whatever they were doing kept puking all over the framebuffer console in the middle of my Cadence session. I send an actual polite email asking them to stop as it was making it difficult for me to draw gates. Got no reply.
Two days later I got hauled in front of my tutor, accused of hacking and being rude to the guy. I suspect I was just logged into the X session on the box and the person I complained about was doing what was supposed to have gone on. I defended this religiously but had to deal with a written warning from the university anyway and the tutor actively tried to compromise my course afterwards.
That’s the day I learned about politics. And unix. Digging into the forensics and causality of this led to a long career as a sysadmin and programmer and not designing chips. And not a decade of poor pay or unemployment like my course peers. So no regrets.
On and off, I've spent several decades on the Super Dimensional Fortress [0] and have never encountered anything remotely like it...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDF_Public_Access_Unix_System
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDF_Public_Access_Unix_System
I love SDF. I’ve had my membership since 2004, it’s one of the constants in my life.
Out of curiosity, what sorts of things do you do on it?
One example is whenever a server isn’t working and I need to see if the connection problem is specific to my machine or LAN, I pop into SDF and ping it from there.
It’s basically a Swiss army knife. You get email, webspace, you can use it as an anonymizing SSH hop, IRC, they have a little proprietary chat system, and all kinds of other tools and systems.
The lifetime membership is so cheap it’s hard to believe it’s real.
It’s basically a Swiss army knife. You get email, webspace, you can use it as an anonymizing SSH hop, IRC, they have a little proprietary chat system, and all kinds of other tools and systems.
The lifetime membership is so cheap it’s hard to believe it’s real.
amen. more public access linux/unix can be found on the tildeverse!
https://tildeverse.org/
https://tildeverse.org/
Any idea why their page is now a rickroll?
They've evolved from the 90s into the 00s.
Because you're visiting from HN and annoying HN users can be funny. See also https://jwz.org (NSFW when visited from HN)
A bit more mean-spirited then that, tildeverse appears to set a cookie as well so the redirect keeps happening.
In my experience, most browsers cache "Permanent" redirects indefinitely, which of course makes it impossible for the user to access the original URL again, or at least until they clear the cache.
For those who may not know about SDF, here is some background that might be helpful. While the user experience these days is quite different than it was in 1987 or even into the mid 1990s, the philosophy has always been focused on UNIX as a multi-user platform for doing what the community wants with it. As a result, there is a very long authentic history and unbroken continuity over the past 35 years which you can still sense when you login and participate in the community. Many of us here (hacker news) use the UNIX shell daily and it is part of our work flow as users, developers and system administrators. Before dialup SLIP/PPP was wide spread (way before cable modems or DSL) the user experience was solely in the shell from their PC or just a terminal with a modem at home. Terminal based utilities such as elm (mail), trn (usenet), telnet, ftp along with useful informational diagnostic programs such as ping, traceroute and whois gave you a glimpse into those diverse systems that made up the internet. In the early days of the web/gopher the bar was lowered significantly and a lot of new folks started to understand what we were doing. We grew!
SDF spawned a handful of commercial internet service providers in Texas although SDF remained independent of them. MetroNET was the first one and lasted up until the dot bomb when it was acquired by Internet America. SDF likely survived the dot bomb due to its community rather than being commercial with customers. By 2004 once facebook really started to take off, using the shell to do anything, specially to new folks, seemed antiquated and 'retro' or even criminal, but it still clicked with folks that there was an immediacy of access to text and the UNIX toolkit that kept it fast and simple. internet community wise, I suppose it was the height of phpforums and cheap (though banner laden) webhosting and the rise of more centralized social networking honeypots. While USENET may be the original fediverse (and we still have USENET) the interface that facebook/myspace/twitter offered was something folks wanted on SDF too. And because we're just a platform, we can build on it. StatusNET/GNU Social/Diaspora/Elgg were things we could try without negatively affecting the community: no one was forced to "upgrade" to Diaspora, it was just another feature. If social networking wasn't your thing (or still isn't) then its not required to use SDF. However, I'll say I'm really happy that Mastodon, Pixelfed and Peertube have really gotten a foot hold. Federated platforms like those allow us to use the internet in its most natural way. I believe they'll continue to make strides, though there are likely always going to be brief phenomenon like "vine" or "tik-tok" that take advantage of people.
So in using SDF, you may run into cool subsystems, friendly users, grumpy users, fun programs, user contributed tutorials and various corpses of tried projects (oh, there are nethack bones files going back into the 1990s btw), but hopefully you'll find that there is a unique and authentic spirit in its community that seems to endure and continues to be built upon.
Have fun!
SMJ
SDF spawned a handful of commercial internet service providers in Texas although SDF remained independent of them. MetroNET was the first one and lasted up until the dot bomb when it was acquired by Internet America. SDF likely survived the dot bomb due to its community rather than being commercial with customers. By 2004 once facebook really started to take off, using the shell to do anything, specially to new folks, seemed antiquated and 'retro' or even criminal, but it still clicked with folks that there was an immediacy of access to text and the UNIX toolkit that kept it fast and simple. internet community wise, I suppose it was the height of phpforums and cheap (though banner laden) webhosting and the rise of more centralized social networking honeypots. While USENET may be the original fediverse (and we still have USENET) the interface that facebook/myspace/twitter offered was something folks wanted on SDF too. And because we're just a platform, we can build on it. StatusNET/GNU Social/Diaspora/Elgg were things we could try without negatively affecting the community: no one was forced to "upgrade" to Diaspora, it was just another feature. If social networking wasn't your thing (or still isn't) then its not required to use SDF. However, I'll say I'm really happy that Mastodon, Pixelfed and Peertube have really gotten a foot hold. Federated platforms like those allow us to use the internet in its most natural way. I believe they'll continue to make strides, though there are likely always going to be brief phenomenon like "vine" or "tik-tok" that take advantage of people.
So in using SDF, you may run into cool subsystems, friendly users, grumpy users, fun programs, user contributed tutorials and various corpses of tried projects (oh, there are nethack bones files going back into the 1990s btw), but hopefully you'll find that there is a unique and authentic spirit in its community that seems to endure and continues to be built upon.
Have fun!
SMJ
Too short, did not read. Listen to this.
https://ia600903.us.archive.org/22/items/bsdtalk021/bsdtalk0...
https://ia600903.us.archive.org/22/items/bsdtalk021/bsdtalk0...
Hi. A long long time ago I paid for an ARPA membership and my account was never upgraded. Who/where should I contact to get this resolved?
[email protected] presumably.
Is there anything that you’d like to see that these venerable pubnix systems don’t provide? I’m considering setting one up for the community.
Documentation; narrative & technical.
Systems like SDF have an enormous rich history of implementing technology but the what, how, and why seems lost.
In a corporate environment, this knowledge is often passed down (or later inferred) because it must be but unavailable to the masses.
I couldn’t technically recreate SDF if I wanted to. I can build something functionally similar but the components would be very different.
Systems like SDF have an enormous rich history of implementing technology but the what, how, and why seems lost.
In a corporate environment, this knowledge is often passed down (or later inferred) because it must be but unavailable to the masses.
I couldn’t technically recreate SDF if I wanted to. I can build something functionally similar but the components would be very different.
The faq menu gives you a lot of system documentation including cost information. There are parts of the system like com and bboard that I don't think were ever meant to be open for folks to use as components in their own system.
It's apparently volunteers and donated hardware so things tend to fall between the cracks...
An easier to use BBS interface based on something open source.
(That being said, today I'd probably opt for Discourse and a nice TUI client)
(That being said, today I'd probably opt for Discourse and a nice TUI client)
Thanks for the suggestion. I may be in a position to fund the development of such TUI tools if a suitable candidate is not already available.
If you enjoy public Unix systems, I’d highly advise taking a look at the Tildeverse community since they offer a wide array of them that all have their own niche.
https://tildeverse.org
https://tildeverse.org
Whoever hosts their website seems very mean spirited.
That link shows me two completely different things on incognito and regular browser.
Incognito shows me the actual page, regular mode Rickrolls me.
EDIT: Oh, later in the thread they're talking about this.
Incognito shows me the actual page, regular mode Rickrolls me.
EDIT: Oh, later in the thread they're talking about this.
Also TOPS-20 at http://twenex.org/ by SDF.
oh the memories! I used sdf more than two decades ago and learnt so much about internet from it.
On a side note- interesting to see the copyright: ©1987-2065
On a side note- interesting to see the copyright: ©1987-2065
I thought that was funny too. Also, after following a link below I wonder if it has to do with this.
SDF Public Access TWENEX
TWENEX.ORG
In 1994 we contacted Texas Women University to try to resurrect their DECSYSTEM-2065
SDF Public Access TWENEX
TWENEX.ORG
In 1994 we contacted Texas Women University to try to resurrect their DECSYSTEM-2065
Easter Egg identified!
And don't forget the public Twenex (TOPS-20) and Plan9 (9Front) boxes
https://sdf.org/plan9/
http://www.twenex.org/
SDF is just great, thanks for anyone involved!!
https://sdf.org/plan9/
http://www.twenex.org/
SDF is just great, thanks for anyone involved!!
1987, using Farallon FTP/telnet on a Windows 3.11, I too visited the SDF.org.
A total immersion of the “outside world” has begun.
A total immersion of the “outside world” has begun.
My first Shell Account when I was like 15. I learned a lot from SDF before I started running BSD at home.
SDF is awesome! Similar in spirit, but more modernized are the family of "tilde" servers (of which the communities have some overlap). Check out https://tilde.club!
I've been on it for many years, love it.
Sadly, Polarhome has thrown in the towel. Does anyone know of something comparable, i.e. not only a public access Unix system, but one that offers a range of Unices?