Doom as a tool for system administration (1999) | Hacker News Reader

Doom as a tool for system administration (1999)

cs.unm.edu

165 pointsCarolineW39 comments

  Certain processes are vital to the computer's operation and should not be
  killed. For example, after I took the screenshot of myself being attacked by
  csh, csh was shot by friendly fire from behind, possibly by tcsh or xv, and
  my session was abruptly terminated.

Haha, this is nuts :)

If someone wants to try it out, a modern version is available here: https://github.com/keymon/psdoom-ng.

I made a PKGBUILD of it for ArchLinux some time ago. You'll need freedoom or something else to have the game datas (yaourt -S psdoom-ng freedoom1; psdoom -iwad /usr/share/games/doom/freedm.wad).

Might be worth while if it lets you kill SystemD.

That would make a good boss battle.

Clearly the spider mastermind...

I wondered what became of Dennis, the author. He got his PhD in 2004 and is now doing computer modeling of infections diseases. http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/resume.html

And its follow-up:

https://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/after.html

And the paper, which that page links to:

https://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/papers/p152-chao.pdf

I started thin Thinking about this all over again lately now that all the easy to mod minecraft clones are popping up, voxel.js or python minecraft in 500 lines for examples. In a minecraft environment it would look a bit less like a employee playing a game and the possibilities are really helpful if you think about them, virtual server rooms you can actually walk into, punch a rack and get a menu, actually punch a connection to take a node offline. Wouldn't mind a way to physically see memory and cpu usage of processes mapped to the size or color of objects in this type of environment either.

https://github.com/docker/dockercraft

You could round it out with that 3D "Unix" file browser from Jurassic Park.

Aka fsn: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn

How about this? http://i0.wp.com/bitcast-a-sm.bitgravity.com/slashfilm/wp/wp...

You could certainly do some interesting 3D 'dashboards' once VR gets cheap enough, would be cool to look out over a grid of boxes where size was related to memory load and color temperature.

Not sure it's practical in that it's damn hard to beat the informational density of good 2D graphs and text but it would certainly be cool (which is often the best reason to do something).

Awww, we played this on a projector at Systems '99 in Munich - probably the most important selling point for Debian, which we were promoting. (And 3 months later I discovered FreeBSD and never looked back, but such is life ;)

Mind elaborating what's good about FreeBSD compared to Debian/Linux. I've heard such statements before.

Btw, I think bloat of linux distros (huge number of similar packages with slight differences have to be installed just because e.g., out of two of the tools I need, one uses libxml and the other perl module XML::Parse, etc, etc) is a problem, which has made me think about minimal cohesive distro that has minimum duplication. Wondering if FreeBSD can help in that regard.

FreeBSD excels at giving you control over how the OS is packaged and built. The ports and packages system is great and makes it straightforward to compile or install packages, respectively. You can build the entire OS with 'make world', which is good if you want to build a stripped-down distro for special purpose use. The BSD license lets you roll a proprietary OS if you want to (Juniper uses FreeBSD in their routers IIRC). It also has a nice ZFS implementation that's supported as a first class citizen due to the BSD license.

Traditionally, it is also known to have a more scalable network stack than Linux, as well as super solid virtual memory and i/o systems.

I still like FreeBSD a lot and donate to the FreeBSD Foundation so they can keep doing what they do, since I think competition is great. But I'll say that in my opinion, the performance and stability differential between FreeBSD and Linux is mostly gone practically speaking. It's still much better organized than Linux distros, and the man pages are great, but I feel that unless you are looking for a BSD licensed OS, Linux is now "good enough" for heavy duty networking and i/o, where in the past you might have chosen FreeBSD for that role. There are some notable exceptions (Netflix uses FreeBSD for their CDN for example), but I do think that Linux has caught up in most areas where FreeBSD previously had a strong lead.

I still have a FreeBSD machine though, cause I love the OS to death. Happy user since 2.1.7.

For one thing, it is a real UNIX in terms of lineage and not a clone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ds77e3aO9nA

http://www.informit.com/store/design-and-implementation-of-t...

Just why is being a "real" UNIX that important?

It is not at all important. Just ignore everyone who tries to lead you down that lane.

The overall culture among the OS users, developers and the respective architecture design decisions.

Personally, I don't care that much.

With time I became increasingly interested in the Xerox PARC world and how much better our current developer experience could have been if those systems had won the market instead of AT&T ones.

I love FreeBSD (and have used it for years and years) but I'll be the first to say the community of FreeBSD (and OpenBSD for that matter) is about as neckbeard as you can get in a community. #FreeBSD on Freenode is one of those Freenode channels that make you want to log off for good. Where a good many Linux communities are helpful and inclusive, the BSD communities are mostly atrocious and toxic. Be mindful of that if you start asking around about BSD.

I was convinced by awesome documentation and a very straight-forward implementation. If I want to understand how $thing works, I look at init-scripts and source and I get it within a few minutes. I never ever feel like searching for a solution on google because the infrastructure is so clean that it's faster to read its source than to read half-baked solutions on stackoverflow.

This finally sounds like the user interface used in Jurassic Park, which I recall was actually a real thing. Which all in all is funny to me for unexplainable reasons.

    Fsn: an experimental application
         to view a file system in 3D

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11555327

These work on modern systems: https://github.com/mcuelenaere/fsv https://github.com/3dfsb-dev/3dfsb

These attempts at 3D UIs never really caught on, but I wonder if they might make a comeback with VR.

I feel like they are more likely with Augmented Reality, which doesn't take over your entire visual environment.

Very nice idea, it could be combined with an IPv4 Space visualization. I am working on it https://github.com/fibo/netvision

related, admin your server with minecraft: https://github.com/simplyianm/sysadmincraft

Also, this: https://github.com/docker/dockercraft. Manage your docker containers in minecraft! (Arguably a much better fit for the block-based world!)

This was originally on Slashdot in 1990's and has been on HN before.

    1. Browse old Slashdot archives for their best links
    2. Post them to HN fifteen-twenty years later
    3. ???
    4. Profit!!!

"I beat Linux. The end process was hard."

It would be cool to hack frotz + inform6 (now you can as is Artistic 2.0 license based) as an awesome psheudo shell and parser for system commands.

Think natural language for users. Heaven.

You are in a directory called 'home'. There are directories to the north, south and west. There are twenty files here. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

take files

tell application "Finder" to quit

That's what I call gamification.

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