I discovered SDF through gopher.
At the beginning I thought it was just some gopherhole host of some
sorts. But then I did some digging and discovered that it expands
it's operations waaay beyond just gopherspace.
Actually, this was the first pubnix I've ever encountered, so SDF
basically introduced me to the concept of a public access UNIX
system. And while I really liked the idea and the community seemed
pretty nice, I wasn't planning on joining. Because why would you
want to use a very restricted shell of some remote machine, when
you can do all of the stuff you want to do on your local brick,
with admin privs?
So I ignored it at first, but then as I was working on this place,
I started looking for ways to host it. The original plan was to
do it on my RPi3 with a VPN to workaround some bullshit problems
caused by my shitty ISP (will be moving soon, so that will change,
fortunately). Well, that didn't work. So ultimately I decided to
follow pvinc and make an account here.
My first experience was really good! One smooth registration later,
I had access to the shell and spent the entire afternoon trying to
talk to people on com, playing games (for some reason I got really
into the zombies game) and browsing the bboard. By the time I
finished the island, I already got the hang of things and
more-or-less knew how to operate around here.
So then came time to put my site on sdf and that's when things
kinda went downhill for me. com broke. Pretty hard.
Switching rooms now gave me some directory error and it seemed like
it made me a ghost. [you are in 'boop' among 0]
Also every time I tried to say something, I got some grep errors
in my face. Great.
But ok, whatever. It's not like com was the selling point.
So I carried on, created the gopherhole with mkgopher and created
appropriate directories. Then I had to upload all of the files.
Without arpa I was really left with 2 choices: either install
something that supports ZMODEM or send all the files to myself via
email. I thought it would be easier with text files, as I could
just create a new file and paste stuff from the clipboard. As it
turns out pasting into the pico editor replaced all tabs with
spaces, rendering all my gophermaps useless, unless I would fix it
manually. And yes, I spent 2 hours fixing them, until I realised
that I can send them along with all the other files.
All of the music sent had their filenames structured like this:
8sync - <name of the track>
Why is it important? Cause it turns out that psh can't handle
whitespaces in strings. This is a problem since now I have a few
files in my home dir, that I just can't delete. Enclosing the
filename in quotation marks just prints the help message of any
program, since it probably got waaay too many arguments.
Also the coreutils don't regognize stuff like wildcards and ..
, but with those it's actually justified since they can be used
for exploitation (see the Zip Slip vuln) and with no verification
of who the user is, it's a reasonable precaution to take.
All in all, a few pieces of software are broken, but the rest of
the system works beautifully and I can't imagine how much time
and effort it took to create such a big, featureful and almost
fully automated system.
