SDF Public Access Unix System ... est. 1987 | Hacker News Reader

SDF Public Access Unix System ... est. 1987

sdf.org

104 pointskmstout27 comments

In the hayday of the fediverse migration, when people left Twitter in droves, I was on their mastodon instance (then on the one for paid members, "arpa"). The instance was buckling under the load, and the federation lagging hours behind the rest of the world, when not down for hours. Then we were behind several versions of Mastodon for months because of difficulties in migrating the DB on NetBSD (which is kind of a religion there)

I remember being frustrated by the lack of communication. The sysadmin was then talking about it on the weekly openmic hour on anonradio and that was a bit better, but the rest of the support was laconic messages on bboard when people asked about updates, and silence most of the times.

The feeling I got was that there is, understandably, a hierarchy of users, and the inner circle is overworked and sometimes struggling, but also incommunicado towards the rest the of the members. Perhaps I'm not the right kind of social person, but I tried and failed to feel at home there. Maybe I misunderstood the whole project.

I still think they are great and I kept donating to it for a while even after I stopped hanging out in com and mastodon. I will maybe try again. I have to invest more human time on it.

Some previous discussions:

April https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47819410

2022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31076886

2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14940790

2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14134798

Love SDF. They run some great services for members, like a mastodon instance and pixelfed.

These are really cool services but to have a proper blast from the past you need to ssh in and join the chat on com or the discussions on bboard

ssh? Don’t you mean telnet?

SSH is 30 years old; it's fine

Telnet is just a better name though.

Is it? I don't get any intuitive connection from "telnet" to "shell access over the network", personally. Although, by the same token I would be open to reusing the rsh name; "remote shell" does seem obvious.

Telnet sounds cooler.

Because telnet was not originally shell access over the network. It was a serial connection.

Plus you can easily setup your own Gopher and/or Gemini site and you can have your WEB site there too.

FWIW, I migrated my WEB Site to Gemini with Gopher as a mirror. Maintaining those on SDF is far easier than maintaining via *panels.

I love them but unfortunately it’s just not as robust as it once was with regards to support. I’ve been locked out for some time now but can’t get a response from anyone. I know it’s volunteer driven but ultimately if people can’t rely on it, they’ll move on. Still happy I was able to support all these years but absent my account getting fixed, this will be my last year of support.

Yeah I’ve been locked out for something like a year due to a config issue on the server side and haven’t been able to get a fix via email or irc so just gave up.

There’s lots of good retro-style communities around these days so I’ve moved on.

Exactly my experience with it, and I did the same, which is a pity.

They also have their own streaming radio. Awesome list of tools. One of the few remaining shining lights of our original hacker culture, in the sense of the term from this forum’s name. Absolutely love SDF.

The Interim Computer Museum in Tukwila, WA, is a partner organization.

https://icm.museum/

I have an SDF login still and I go in there every once in awhile but don't really know what others use it for

I was hosting a site there, but the administration is unresponsive and I gave up on them. Lovely place, though.

It’s great when you want to check on a server or IP from an outside network. You can do that from a phone but with SDF you have your full desktop terminal if you like and a clean cache.

They allow port scans?

I did use nmap on a Linux VM going over the free ProtonVPN for this purpose, but at some point Proton broke something (it may be related to their VPN accelerator feature) and checking any port always reports "Open" (even if it's not), so sadly that made this cool use case entirely useless for me. It definitely was nice to know you had no open ports other than the ones you purposefully opened. :)

I still host my site there. I sometimes use it as a private git remote. The people you meet there in bboard and com are necessarily very interesting :)

It's a webhost. It's a BBS. It's one of the largest shared unix systems to learn your way around the shell without a computer.

I use it for several purposes : a few PHP scripts serving custom RSS files, easy temporary space for exchanging epub books between my phone and my e-reader, etc.

See also www.polarhome.com which has sadly closed shell accounts and shutdown machines.

Discovering SSH, bash, linux etc in 2004 was magical for me. I always liked the idea of SDF and polarhome and did a similar thing with a few friends for a while, albeit with limited success. Proper internet.

Still got my account from the 90s