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Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

SDF and its "long-running public multitenant shell server" kin are all pretty old, and not one of them has been spared from slowdowns due to oversubscription.

It's sort of like an MMO: it's only fun when you're on a heavily-populated "shard", but that also means that you're all putting strain on the same server.

I'm surprised that there's no more modern implementation of the same multitenant "shell system" as a scale-free distributed architecture—like Mesos, z/OS, or any other "multi-tenant scheduler of interactive container-jobs with access to a common GlusterFS volume" kind of approach. A PaaS you can hang out in like a BBS.

Come to think, you could put one of these up on AWS, using EC2 autoscaling + K8s/Docker Swarm + Amazon EFS for storage, quite easily. Has anyone done this yet?

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There /is/ a modern, well-managed open-registration shell and IRC service, similar to what you're talking about, called Hashbang. You can join via https://hashbang.sh.

We're reasonably active, and we have almost 1400 registered users [edited: i was corrected by a hashbang admin as to the amount].

The ultimate purpose of hashbang is to expose more users to a traditional remote UNIX server and command line, as well as teaching people how to use it. We've created a slight barrier to entry with the intentionally obtuse signup flow, as we don't want completely non-technical users flooding the service.

I promise we won't bite :D

To join would require me to run code from the website.. or initiate a call to their API via curl?

My initial reaction was to run (and the gpg call made me curious):

    curl hashbang.sh

I was encouraged by what i saw.

Yep. You can download/verify that script by hand, or hit the endpoints yourself. They just run stuff to provision your user and files and add you to our LDAP directory.

Can confirm hitting the endpoint with curl works. Thanks for the account! :) Going to go poke around.

Or take a look at the page source.

Source is: https://github.com/hashbang

> Come to think, you could put one of these up on AWS, using EC2 autoscaling + K8s/Docker Swarm + Amazon EFS for storage, quite easily. Has anyone done this yet?

Cloud9 IDE works a bit like that. They provide free 'workspaces', and each workspace is hosted in a Docker container on their managed fleet. You have shell and file system access. They wrote a bit about how it works in this blog post: https://c9.io/blog/announcing-the-all-new-cloud9-development...

> Our new workspaces are powered by Docker Ubuntu containers. Every workspace is a fully self-contained VM, so you can run any development stack (e.g. a WordPress website and a Node.js web app) in parallel without running into configuration issues. Each workspace gives you full freedom over your environment, including sudo rights, so any development stack can be set up, built, and run without any hassle.

I use SDF daily. The message system is bboard, and if you stay off the anonymous board, it is full of smart and interesting discussion. The most active group chat program is com, and it stays active most of the day.

Long-time SDF user here as well (MetaARPA). Agree that bboard has some of the most interesting discussion that I've seen on the Internet in a long time.

This is what I'm currently working on, a much more sophisticated version of termbox.io, which I built last year to test the idea. Turns out that Docker has many pitfalls for this kind of thing, so I'm using LXD instead. Clustering is built on Consul and some custom code because the aim is to run on dedicated servers. I want it to be cheaper than DO/Linode, so EC2 is simply not an option.

When it's finished, it will let you launch machines in 5 seconds, with a choice of images for different purposes (like development, pentesting, offloading heavy computation etc).

My plan is to also open source most of it post-launch (it will require some additional efforts to extract specialized functionality). If anyone is interested in joining me, shoot me an email and we can talk.

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