GHOST SHELL
Generally speaking I don't like cloud computing, for all the usual
grumpy-techie reasons. Of course it all boils down to the old idea
of remote access that the Tildes are built around, and I obviously
don't find that so offensive, but at the same time my account on
Aussies.space is really just for anonymous content hosting on
Gopher. I've played around with using it for practical tasks, and
there are a couple of other things that I started using it for, but
in general as I'm always using a Linux system which I have full
control over there's usually not much point.
However a few months ago I finally succeeded (and it took some
trying I tell you) in signing up for one of these free VPS offers
that big cloud-computing services have been offering. It's the best
one too, in my opinion, because so far they claim it won't expire.
It's with Oracle Cloud, and although I don't like the company, and
setting it up how you want involves wading through lots of weird
Oracle mumbo-jumbo while watching to make sure you side-step all
their paid features, I can't help but be impressed by what you can
get for nothing. I mean, for $0 I've probably got more computing
power in the VPS than _any_ physical system I've ever accessed!
Granted that's because I'm cheap and never use other people's
computers anymore, but it's still equivalent to some pretty
expensive physical hardware if you wanted it all on your desktop.
Plus equally importantly, its got over 200GB storage that I can
fill with stuff downloaded at super-quick speeds for pre-processing
without having to feed it through my slow and 3GB/month limited
internet connection.
https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/
that link is bound to go dead before long, so:
http://web.archive.org/web/20211101212745/https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/
But there are two sides to that last point, because slow internet
also means laggy SSH access. Now learning to turn on SSH
compression some time ago (part of my Aussies experience actually)
helps a bit, and as this VPS is also in Australia it's not nearly
as bad as with my website VPS in the USA, but that little bit of
lag still gets me. Half the trouble is that I'm very typo-prone at
the command line, more so the more things are going wrong with
whatever I'm trying to do, so I'm always trying to move back and
forwards through the line to edit things. Also, probably due to my
rural mobile broadband connection, the delay that does happen
varies all the time so you can't really get used to it. Sometimes
it just gets stuck and I have a second or two of wondering whether
the connection has died. Plus there's text editing where it's
really hard to accept today an experience that's less responsive
than editing text on a computer from the 1980s.
My solution, which as usual I'm way too lazy to try implementing
myself, is what I'm calling a "ghost shell". The basic idea is that
your local PC runs the same shell program as the remote system, but
this shell program has been modified in order to synchronise all
aspects of the shell environment. So you can compose a command on
your computer with all the speed of a local TTY emulation, while at
the same time the remote system is "catching up" with what you're
doing, then you only have to wait for the delay when you execute
the command and wait to see the result.
Additionally for interactively editing text files, the shell
automatically transfers the file over to your machine and runs it
in the editor you have installed locally, then transfers it back.
I have realised that all this could be done by setting up a VPN
between the local computer and the remote server, then using eg.
NFS to work on files and rexec to launch programs (with a helpful
script to make the rexec command's environment match that in your
local shell). But that's complicated to set up and more clunky to
use. It's probably a more rational approach for me than writing a
"ghost shell" program though. Especially as this is probably one of
those things that seems to me like it should be useful to lots of
other people, but in reality nobody else cares.
- The Free Thinker, 2021
