OpenBSD Journal

devio.us - The Free OpenBSD Shell Provider

Contributed by mtu on from the thou-shalt-let-cowards-speak-anonymously dept.

devio.us - The Free OpenBSD Shell Provider

This is a service that caught my interest. At first, I thought to myself, "why would I want a shell account on a box that I don't control?" My problem is that I have too many shell accounts. So what can be gained by having another shell account and what is so special about this free shell account provider?

Read on to find out more about devio.us:

First off, this is a project run by a group of Unix Admins that are passionate about OpenBSD. Moreover, they are providing a free service for anyone with very little restrictions. This is kind of interesting on many fronts.

Why are they doing this? I read that they wanted to create a community of like minded folks; a community filled with UNIX and OpenBSD enthusiasts, developers, network engineers and so forth. However, on a deeper level, most of the devio.us Admin team have worked in the web hosting industry for quite a few years. It is perhaps this experience that drove them to create this project.

I was told that you tend to feel disconnected from the clients that you support on a daily basis. After a thousand support tickets, that 'inner reward' factor begins to diminish and the only satisfaction stems from working on other internal projects. In order to alleviate this debilitating effect, the devio.us team wanted to 'reconnect' with their users and establish a sort of camaraderie amongst the community. Furthermore, they have a serious love affair with OpenBSD and wanted to spread the message and encourage users to try the OS.

There are two interesting things that I learned about the sign-up process. There is a question in the sign-up form that asks "What will you use the account for?". Almost 60% of the users stated during sign-up that they wanted to learn more about OpenBSD! Not everyone is given a shell account though. In fact, for every three sign-up requests, they reject one for some reason or another.

On the first day on my new shell account, I received a talk message from someone I didn't know. It turned out to be someone from China who was happy to talk with anyone and he didn't know who I was. I was a bit turned off by that and questioned why it was enabled on the server. This is part of the education aspect, I was told. They want to get people into Unix and everyone gets wide eyed when they 'talk/ytalk' someone for the first time. Fair enough. It really isn't for me. I'm rarely ever on any chat program as I can never get any work done.

Anyhow, what do you get on the free shell account? The details are here but essentially you get access to all the packages on the system, 100 MB of personal space for free, a good Internet connection and IPv6 support coming soon. So long as you are not abusing the resources, tunnelling and port forwarding are permitted but not for watching youtube videos or any P2P file sharing. You can read their policy for more details. I really like their common sense attitude and goals.

Perhaps the biggest concern or question for most OpenBSD users is what about security? How the heck can you trust a system with so many users and packages installed on it? At least, this was the first thing that came to my mind. Indeed, this will be an interesting experiment, if I can call it that, on two fronts. It is hard for me to trust a system where I am not the only user on that system. Secondly, this server is going to be pushed to the limits in some form or manner. That said, it already has bigmem support. So far, I like what I see and the direction they are taking this. It has never been done before to my knowledge, at least not on OpenBSD and I have confidence in the Admins looking after the system. I think that they are doing a great job in many respects.

I will leave the inner details and workings of this project to another article or two as I'm sure that many of you have questions. Hopefully, they'll be answered for you in the next article or so. In the meantime, why don't you have a look at the site, sign-up to get your free OpenBSD shell account and check it out for yourself. The process doesn't take very long and there really aren't very many questions and what information they collect will not be sold. They will also do their utmost to protect the data that you put on your personal site. I don't know about you but this is a good deal considering that it is for free. You can also upgrade your account for a few pennies a day and do a lot more. I would strongly recommend you to at least have a look.

I would like to thank the devio.us team for setting this up for the community. I really appreciate and fully support their efforts. They're a bunch of smart people doing something very unique with OpenBSD on a scale that may surprise many in a few years, if not months from now. Stay tuned for more on devio.us in the next little while.

Mark T. Uemura

(Comments are closed)


Comments
  1. By Motley Fool (MotleyFool) motleyfool@dieselrepower.org on

    Well, I figured what the heck. I'd sign up for an account. They will either recognize my e-mail address from the OpenBSD community and let me join, or they will recognize me and say, "What the HECK, we aren't letting that SOB^H^H^HB" have an account.

    good luck to them.

    Comments
    1. By Motley Fool (MotleyFool) on

      > Well, I figured what the heck. I'd sign up for an account. They will either recognize my e-mail address from the OpenBSD community and let me join, or they will recognize me and say, "What the HECK, we aren't letting that SOB^H^H^HB" have an account.
      >
      > good luck to them.

      Chuckle, they are fast. Just got an account. Thanks

  2. By Zachary (zmisc) zachary@sdf.lonestar.org on

    I just signed up for a free shell. I'd like to tell the author of the article for informing me of this service. I'm glad to find a free OpenBSD shell service seeing a majority of them are Linux based.

    Comments
    1. By Zachary (zmisc) on

      Well, I just received my free shell account and I am very impressed. Really great service here and as the author of this article said the sysadmins are quite liberal.

  3. By erl (erlang) on

    wow the service is awesome, i really appreciate the people behind that site, especially for me who just a student that need to learn more openbsd system in general.

  4. By Renaud Allard (renaud) renaud@allard.it on

    I also signed up.
    I am a little bit curious on why they praise screen that much, while tmux can do it more reliably and is included in OpenBSD base.

    Comments
    1. By Motley Fool (MotleyFool) on

      > I also signed up.
      > I am a little bit curious on why they praise screen that much, while tmux can do it more reliably and is included in OpenBSD base.

      Yeah, why did they even install screen on the system if tmux is there? There are 19 users currently running screen when they could be running tmux.

    2. By Renaud Allard (renaud) on

      > I also signed up.

      Got my account...

      Funny stats:
      for SHELL in `awk -F "/" '{ print $7 }' /etc/passwd | sort -u |grep -v "^$"` ; do echo -n "$SHELL: "; grep -c $SHELL /etc/passwd; done
      bash: 1487
      csh: 82
      ksh: 138
      tcsh: 59
      uucp: 1
      zsh: 201

      Comments
      1. By Otto Moerbeek (otto) on http://www.drijf.net

        > > I also signed up.
        >
        > Got my account...
        >
        > Funny stats:
        > for SHELL in `awk -F "/" '{ print $7 }' /etc/passwd | sort -u |grep -v "^$"` ; do echo -n "$SHELL: "; grep -c $SHELL /etc/passwd; done
        > bash: 1487
        > csh: 82
        > ksh: 138
        > tcsh: 59
        > uucp: 1
        > zsh: 201
        >

        Funny way to count. I'd use

        awk -F : '{ print $7 }' /etc/passwd | sort | uniq -c

        Comments
        1. By Renaud Allard (renaud) on


          > Funny way to count. I'd use
          >
          > awk -F : '{ print $7 }' /etc/passwd | sort | uniq -c
          >
          >

          Well, that's mostly because I used part of the command formerly and didn't want to retype it.

          Not exactly the same output layout, but of course works :)

          $ awk -F : '{ print $7 }' /etc/passwd | sort | uniq -c
          1 /bin/ksh
          55 /sbin/nologin
          1 /usr/libexec/uucp/uucico
          1786 /usr/local/bin/bash
          28 /usr/local/bin/csh
          179 /usr/local/bin/ksh
          69 /usr/local/bin/tcsh
          229 /usr/local/bin/zsh

          It's also funny they put all shells in /usr/local/bin, even those available in /bin

          Comments
          1. By brynet (Brynet) on

            > It's also funny they put all shells in /usr/local/bin, even those available in /bin

            Perhaps {ksh,csh} are different implementations of said shells in base?

            Comments
            1. By Barry Grumbine (barry) on

              > > It's also funny they put all shells in /usr/local/bin, even those available in /bin
              >
              > Perhaps {ksh,csh} are different implementations of said shells in base?

              They're just symbolic links:

              barry@wolfman $ ls -l /usr/local/bin/[ck]sh
              lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 8 Apr 29 19:00 /usr/local/bin/csh -> /bin/csh
              lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 8 Apr 29 19:00 /usr/local/bin/ksh -> /bin/ksh

              Comments
              1. By brynet (Brynet) on

                > They're just symbolic links:
                >
                > barry@wolfman $ ls -l /usr/local/bin/[ck]sh
                > lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 8 Apr 29 19:00 /usr/local/bin/csh -> /bin/csh
                > lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 8 Apr 29 19:00 /usr/local/bin/ksh -> /bin/ksh
                >

                Well that's just silly, lol.. I might understand if it was simply dynamically linked variants of the base shells (..considering they have thousands of users), but it makes no sense to make such links.

                Comments
                1. By Daniel (zeeby) on http://devio.us/

                  > > They're just symbolic links:
                  > >
                  > > barry@wolfman $ ls -l /usr/local/bin/[ck]sh
                  > > lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 8 Apr 29 19:00 /usr/local/bin/csh -> /bin/csh
                  > > lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 8 Apr 29 19:00 /usr/local/bin/ksh -> /bin/ksh
                  > >
                  >
                  > Well that's just silly, lol.. I might understand if it was simply dynamically linked variants of the base shells (..considering they have thousands of users), but it makes no sense to make such links.

                  It was done to decrease complexity in our user management tools - it was simpler to create links for all shells to /usr/local/bin/*, instead of making a note of where each shell is located.

                  Comments
                  1. By brynet (Brynet) on

                    > It was done to decrease complexity in our user management tools - it was simpler to create links for all shells to /usr/local/bin/*, instead of making a note of where each shell is located.

                    You mean, like, /etc/shells? lmao.

  5. By Wesley MOUEDINE ASSABY (wesley) wesley@mouedine.net on www.mouedine.net

    I just signed up, it is usefull to test shell script ;-)
    Thank's to Mark T.Uemura and of course DEVIO.US

  6. By Jeff Quast (dingo) af.dingo@gmail.com on

    silenceisdefeat.com is a similar service, so you can look forward to something like this in your mailbox one day:

    date: Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 12:52 PM
    subject: Silence Is Defeat security notification

    You are receiving this email because you have or had an account on Silence Is Defeat Public Access Unix Systems.

    Our sshd daemon was recently compromised, resulting in a user obtaining cleartext password dumps for attempted logins. If you have logged in since 1 November 2009, please reset your password as soon as possible.

    There have been no known actions taken with the compromised passwords as of 26 April 2010. The sshd daemon on silenceisdefeat has been recompiled from clean source code and the offending user has been removed.

    - SD Staff

    --

    I never use any shell hosting providers or accounts shared by other non-root users that I don't know, pay or free. Shell hosting providers are highly targeted. I'm sure the admins are great, but so are my local police, but I don't count on them to prevent a robbery, just as I wouldn't count on these admins.

  7. By Bryan Horstman-Allen (bdha) bdha@mirrorshades.net on http://mirrorshades.net

    Anyone remember metawire? ;-)

  8. By Benz SL600 (benz.sl600) benz.sl600@gmail.com on

    I can't access devio.us today :( Anybody else experiencing the same issue?

    Comments
    1. By Joachim Schipper (Joachim) on http://www.joachimschipper.nl/About me

      They have some planned downtime; they're trying to resolve a livelock issue, apparently. See their blog once it comes back up.

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