Review of Blinkenshell after several years

Written on: Thu, 17 Feb 2022 15:34:27 +0000

Before knowing that blinkenshell exists

Well, like most people, the computer is basically just for fun. Windows for multimedia, documents, and games.

Out of curiousity, trying various command line tools. One caught me: telnet. So the next step is obvious: finding telnet server to connect to. That leads me into SDF.org.

Like the old days, the natural progress is hosting some stuffs online. There is gopher within sdf.org but gopher is not accessible by average person and trying web development to show off some personal project.

After some learning, I found that telnet sends every typed character unencrypted. So the beginning of new adventure: ssh as the next-gen protocol for remote access. So this is the beginning of the adventure. Trying to find good ssh access out there: sdf.org is still the pioneer for this.

This was the beginning of security awareness of the computer. Good work for OpenBSD folks for developing OpenSSH and spreading awareness of the importance of computer security.

Blinkenshell, what?

Blinkenshell, as reviewed by many reviewer, is a good community. So I tried getting an account at Blinkenshell.

Well, the process of getting account here is so cumbersome. I need to get vouched several times before continuing the signup process. It took me several days to get an account here. Thanks for someone at Blinkenshell IRC who gave me vouch so I can get access to Blinkenshell.

Back in the old days...

Blinkenshell was running Gentoo. One user cannot see what another user doing nor peek into other user files. This is still true on 2022, so privacy at Blinkenshell is the best compared to other shell providers.

Each user has separate $HOME directory, which is mounted separately from the rest of the system. This is still true for 2022, so I consider this as very good file access for multi user system.

And now

Blinkenshell runs on Ubuntu. I appreciate this. The server is using shiny new AMD Epyc system with more memory and more disk quota. Win for Blinkenshell and win for users.

whirlpool@triton
----------------
OS: Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS x86_64
Host: KVM/QEMU (Standard PC (Q35 + ICH9, 2009) pc-q35-4.2)
Kernel: 5.4.143-bs
Uptime: 113 days, 6 hours, 20 mins
Packages: 739 (dpkg)
Shell: bash 5.0.17
Terminal: /dev/pts/25
CPU: AMD EPYC-Rome (4) @ 3.593GHz
GPU: Red Hat, Inc. QEMU Virtual Machine
Memory: 4358MiB / 11990MiB

Since it runs Ubuntu, I can download Ubuntu packages for missing software, unpack the package into $HOME/.local, add $HOME/.local/bin into $PATH, add $HOME/.local/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu into $LD_LIBRARY_PATH and done. The move to Ubuntu is huge win for both admins and users at Blinkenshell.

I've created a shell script to simplify the process.

#!/bin/sh

DEBDIR="$HOME/.cache/apt/archives"
TARGETDIR="$HOME/.local"
test_dir() {
	 [ -d "$DEBDIR" ] || mkdir -p "$DEBDIR"
	 [ -d "$TARGETDIR" ] || mkdir -p "$TARGETDIR"
}
show_usage() {
	echo "Usage: install-apt.sh pkgname"
}

if [ -z "$@" ] ; then 
	show_usage
else
	test_dir
	cd $DEBDIR
	for url in \
		$(apt install --print-uris $@ | grep http | tr -d \' | awk '{print $1}') ; do \
		[ -f "$(basename ${url})" ] || curl -LO "$url"
dpkg-deb -x "${DEBDIR}/$(basename ${url})" "$TARGETDIR"
		done ;
	cd -
fi

Next step forward

Since https is widely accessible, the next step is getting this website served over https. It seems that this is possible, I just need to setup certificate and some admin assistance.