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Insipired by the webring thread, would anyone be interested in making a lainchan tilde? i.e. SSH in to a shared remote operating system. But doing something technically cool, like having it be opaquely distributed among many instances so that anyone can add to it's body, maybe exclusively over TOR or other network privacy systems. Maybe each instance doesn't have to be a dedicated operating system, but run as any other process in another operating system. I think this is at least thematically fitting with Serial Experiments Lain, because of how Lain builds an ISP in her bedroom using multiple machines, and ISPs, as you know, grew out of dial-in BBSes, which such shared remote operating systems technically and spiritually resemble. If there's any interest.. Maybe we could call Parallel Tildes Lain or something. I'm thinking it could also be integrated with the usual lainchan stuff, like the radio, chat, maybe even a command-line interface to the messageboard? Or not, if that would be worrisome in terms of spam or something.

>>34563 That sounds like a cool idea

>>34563 Sounds cool but you'd need to work out a lot of the specifics. Thankfully since other tildes exist you can see some of what they're doing to prevent things like spam, illegal content, so on. I would at least promote people who know more than I do discussing how this would actually be achieved. >command-line interface to the messageboard This would be quite nice on its own as a standalone program. You can browse and post on Lainchan from a non-graphical browser, but I find it to be a pretty clunky experience.

>>34563 I fuarking like it alice. Its awesome to seen lainons building soykaf.

What are the options for a distributed OS? I could potentially throw some cash at a cheap VPS to play with, and I could help out with the technical setup/config, but I don't have time to deal with moderation. If I could just be a node in a cluster or something that would be more feasible. We would probably have more options along these lines if we agreed to host in the same datacenter to keep inter-node latency low (perhaps one of OVH/kimsufi's european DCs?), but again I don't know much about distributed OS's.

>>34590 Just following up on this idea: what about some kind of distributed container host? Instead of a user account, each user gets a lxc (or whatever) container to play with? This does defeat the purpose of a tilde to an extent, since not as much is intrinsically shared between users, but it also allows for more flexibility since each user essentially gets their own vps (perhaps with some shared NFS mounts). At the very least I don't think this has been tried before in the context of a tilde (or tilde-like) site, so it would distinguish the lainchan tilde from the others.

>>34590 When I hear distributed OS, the first thing that comes to my mind is plan9

>>34591 Having a lainchan docker swarm to host users websites out of would be cool. Can you limit CPU, memory and bandwidth to containers ?

>>34591 Right, one of the main points of a tilde is that it just uses Unix as the multi-user operating system it was originally designed to be. Like a "modern mainframe".

>>34590 >We would probably have more options along these lines if we agreed to host in the same datacenter to keep inter-node latency low I think the point of having it distributed would be so that it doesn't have to be so close together, for the sake of robustness. I think that means there would have to be a lot of retooling for things to be asynchronous. >>34591 >Instead of a user account, each user gets a lxc (or whatever) container to play with? This does defeat the purpose of a tilde to an extent, since not as much is intrinsically shared between users, but it also allows for more flexibility since each user essentially gets their own vps (perhaps with some shared NFS mounts). I think you're right about it being less like a shared operating system, and more like multiple operating systems. It also starts looking like a generic private server. I think one of the important things is the `social' aspect of tildes. Nonetheless, there are some `social' aspects that I don't like, such the who(1) command to see who's online. I think everything should be private by default, but to encourage participating in the `social' aspects. Of course there'd be the question of how to do that. >At the very least I don't think this has been tried before in the context of a tilde (or tilde-like) site, so it would distinguish the lainchan tilde from the others. Maybe it could be one of many experiments. One thing I think might be interesting is having the services be paid, but cheap / at-cost, and if you want to host a node, you'll be paid for it's being used. Maybe not even actually paid, but for the accounting to be kept (regularly purged?) as a matter of exercise. The insistence on `gratis' services causes companies to try to make money otherwise e.g. selling what data they have about you to advertisers.

>>34610 >One thing I think might be interesting is having the services be paid, but cheap / at-cost The problem with payment is less about the actual cost and more about the privacy implications and hassle of dealing with it. The only practical way to take an automatic recurring subscription is with a credit card processing service of some kind, which usually entails revealing your name to the vendor. You could of course do something with crypto but afaik there aren't many good options that amount to more than "here's my wallet number, remember to send payment every month or I'm going to purge your account". Not to mention conversion rates and the fact that the hosting bill has to be paid in state currency. >The insistence on `gratis' services causes companies to try to make money The site you're currently posting on is evidence otherwise. I'd consider paying the $5/mo it would cost to lease a VPS if we could come up with a good plan for how to use it, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. >Maybe not even actually paid, but for the accounting to be kept (regularly purged?) as a matter of exercise. What do you mean?

In terms of lain* integration, I'd imagine the command-line interface could be something like `lain radio listen station' (maybe we'll let users host their own radio stations, e.g. `lain radio broadcast ...') (maybe we'll have lain television stations, too e.g. `lain television watch ...') `lain chat room' `lain chan read ...' to read the specified part of the chan. `lain chan send board board [thread thread] author author email email subject subject body body attachment attachment [spoiler] attachment attachment [spoiler] ... passcode passcode' or, on the lain tilde, wrapped to something like: listen/watch station, chat room, lurk /board/thread#post, post /board/thread ... One thing I might be worried about is accidentally encouraging the poster to unnecessarily identify themself e.g. if they configure their .lainrc to automatically put some string in the `author' field.

>>Maybe not even actually paid, but for the accounting to be kept (regularly purged?) as a matter of exercise. Maybe they meant so that the accounting systems are ready for when the freer currencies mature, that would entail actually using it so that errors can be more easily found and corrected, but because of the present difficulties about having it really be a paid service, it might be only as a `dry run.' >The site you're currently posting on is evidence otherwise. Not really. Yes, there are exceptions to dataminery, and lainchan, it's admins, mods, donators,, have my gratitude for helping make this place remain free in both senses, and high quality, but much of the internet are datamines. I think the point is about fairly distributing the costs of running the services among those that use them. Maybe it would work better than the `free-by-default but please donate' system. I dunno. >I'd consider paying the $5/mo it would cost to lease a VPS if we could come up with a good plan for how to use it, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. And you'll have my gratitude, too, if we end up actually doing this. Of course, that is a good point about privacy. Maybe there's a way to maintain privacy and have it be a paid service?

>When I hear distributed OS, the first thing that comes to my mind is plan9 Hmm, I don't think we should restrict it to only one base operating system. It would be a distributed system, that acts like an operating system, but I think a person should be able to run an instance on whatever kernel so long as it satisfies the interface. I think making it a literate programme could be neat. I think putting it on OpenBSD could be made really neat: pkg_add lain; adjust /etc/laind.rc; rcctl enable laind; rcctl start laind.

>>34613 Sporestack.com will give you a VPS for crypto with No details at all. Just pay and ssh in. They even have an API.

>>34563 >distributed among many instances so that anyone can add to it's body Sounds vague, do you have anything particular in mind to get distributed state? >>34592 plan9 looks good.

>>34637 >It would be a distributed system, that acts like an operating system From my understanding it's difficult to fully abstract the hardware unless you're just basically doing a cluster of containers (kubernetes or similar). Even that requires a master/controller node, so it's not fully distributed, right? I was the one that suggested this, but honestly the responses have gotten me thinking it might be better to keep it to a more classic multi user unix/linux environment. Although I haven't looked too deeply into the plan 9 option that was mentioned itt.

>>34727 I'm not sure it should be abstracting the hardware. Somehow have it like each node is independent, but offers some services to whatever/external; the whole laintilde thing would be a protean sort of web of interconnected nodes, some offering some services, some requesting some of the offered services---all ultimately dictated by user, and somehow (again), presented in some stable way to user. Maybe that's why it might have each little thing be `paid' in some way, albeit very small, to incentivize, in whole, this whole web, or rather all the nodes, to conform to user need.

>>34727 >I haven't looked too deeply into the plan 9 option > Diskless CPU servers concentrate computing power into large multiprocessors; file servers provide repositories for storage; and terminals give each user of the system a dedicated computer with bitmap screen and mouse on which to run a window system. The sharing of computing and file storage services provides a sense of community for a group of programmers > users may choose whether to run programs locally on their terminals or remotely on CPU servers. > Figure 1 > Multiprocessor CPU and file servers are clustered in a few computer rooms > users wishing more autonomy can incorporate as much computing power as they wish in their own offices without losing the advantage of transparently sharing other resources.

>>34563 So you basically mean a distributed ssh board? You could probably federate each instance with UUCP or something similar.

>>34761 >>34732 Yeah I think an actual distributed "cloud" OS might be difficult to accomplish since most solutions require a controller node anyway and the container idea would somewhat defeat the purpose of multi user unix. I am open to some kind of federation though. Would it be sufficient for a user account on one server to grant access to every other server? We could probably accomplish that with LDAP or kerberos or similar. The only thing is I don't know how easy it is to make something like that properly federated (i.e. server A auths against its own user list as well as user lists from servers B and C, rather than a single canonical LDAP server). If that were possible, we could simply mount all remote home directories via NFS so that the social aspect is maintained, while allowing server operators some leeway to configure the rest of their system as they like, and to define their own rules. I would also suggest running this federation over a VPN mesh (my preference is wireguard) so that operators can easily expose services to the federated swarm without worrying too much about auth. This would be a bit complicated, and not something I would be comfortable configuring totally on my own (particularly if we used *BSDs rather than linux), but if we have other lainons with better sysadmin skills willing to collaborate it seems feasible.

>>34761 It's not quite an SSH board. It's an actual Unix server with multiple user accounts. Most tildes set up an http server that automatically serves some public directory in each user's home, and also implement a local IRC or email server. Users can also read and execute scripts in other users' home directories.

>>34766 Ok. But the same applies to this concept, since whether you have an ssh board or just public shell accounts like sdf, you would federate data between them using something like UUCP or a similar protocol. UUCP is how fidonet was federated.You could use xmpp, nntp, bittorrent, etc.

>>34774 I would also implement that over something like 34764 suggested. Wireguard tunnels or some other vpn mesh.

same guy that made these posts >>34761, >>34774, and >>34775. To clear some things up, we already know how this is gonna work on the frontend, right? Are we just trying to figure out what we need for the backend?

I'm making the logo

Me again >>34776 I have a rough idea on how this can work. It would basically be an intranet over the internet. People can erect their servers and connect them to the wireguard mesh. In theory, these servers could provide shell accounts, and users can host services over the intranet. Users on other servers can access these services and also host their own, which users on other servers connected to this network can use. Like irc and game servers and such. Web servers, game servers, etc. can be accessed by ssh tunneling into the network with their shell accounts. Is this what OP was asking for?

I'm not familiar with UUCP (unix-unix copy?), but the name suggests it's a unix-specific tool. I think we shouldn't rely too-much on the tools specific to one operating system. The idea being to (at least in the future) let instances of whatever operating system federate with it. >>34776, I think more-or-less, yes. The basic interface is public-key authenticated SSH, and shell commands. I think that's enough for us to start, and then we might later add other user-interfaces. So then I think the primary question now is to figure out the `back end.' >>34782, I think OP was more describing some abstract ideas for it. That's probably in the right direction.

I wonder if we can borrow the ``lainon.life'' domain name (currently used for lain radio) for the lain tilde.

I think we're overthinking this. Let's just start with a regular old tilde type system, and we'll think about how to add distinctive features as we get going.

>>34882 I would suggest that people who are interested in participating leave a reply with the following >how experienced are you with *nix server administration? >what is your preferred OS/distro (ultimately whoever actually pays for the thing gets to pick, but it would be good to know what people are comfortable with) >what services should the tilde definitely have (email, chat,. ...) >what would you personally like to work on? >how should we handle registration, moderation, deciding who gets sudo, etc?

>registration: I think at first, something simple like an automated form that allows a prospective user to specify their desired login-name and their SSH public key, and some arbitrary data that might help the registration decision be made. Maybe in the future we can have a neophytes probation mode that limits access until it's determined that it's probably OK to let them use other things. Maybe this could involve some sort of competency test. >administration: I think any user who's competent can be given as much administrative privileges as possible. Maybe not full root privileges, e.g. no /var/log write access. Obviously, this would put much trust into many users, so we'd have to ensure we can restore the system easily, and users shouldn't expect privacy. >administration experience: Self-administration. >preferred OS: OpenBSD. >what would you work on? design, documentation,, `high level' stuff. >tilde services: special manpages, including overview; email, usenet, chat,, external?; shared public filestore; personal netsites, CGI?, per-user onions/eepsites?; alternate netsite protocols (e.g. gopher, gemini,,)?; peer-to-peer (e.g. BitTorrent, eDonkey,,)?; lainchan commandline interface; ... >caveats some things should be opt-in i.e. disabled by default: having one's online status listed, having one's terminal written to, ...

>>34886 >experience Just my own home server stuff. Also have some experience with enterprise networking. >preferred OS Linux is the only one I'm comfortable with. Some niche binary distro like void or alpine might be cool. I'd be open to giving *BSD a shot, although I wouldn't be as useful wrt setting it up if we went that route. >services I like the idea of making it exclusively a hidden service, but maybe that's impractical/annoying. The main benefit, besides being a fun idea, is that it keeps people from using it as a proxy for soykaf that will get the owner in trouble. Definitely shared git repos and some kind of simple web interface for them. Filesharing/piracy would be cool but potentially risky and video and music eats up a lot of server space. A shared ebook library would be cool though. Maybe some kind of MUD? Certainly throw some old TUI games like nethack and dwarf fortress on there. >what do I want to work on I'm decent at writing shell scripts and general system config/maintenance. >>34902 Some good ideas here. >we'd have to ensure we can restore the system easily, and users shouldn't expect privacy Agreed. >I think any user who's competent can be given as much administrative privileges as possible I think a good way to handle this might be to have a sort of sub-admin tier which gets rw access to /usr/local or whatever but not actual root. That way they can write scripts and install some software that everyone can use, but people can be sure that everything under e.g. /usr/bin was put there by the owner/admin, and should be consistent with repo packages. Maybe if there's enough people there could also be a regular admin tier that has rw on enough of /usr and /etc so that they can use the package manager, change config, add/remove users, and has rw access to home directories, but is not a full sudoer and can't e.g. modify log files. >having one's online status listed You'd have to somehow hide the process tree, no? Since by default anyone can just look to see if you have an interactive session running.

Might I remark, something cool I found about dial-in BBS is that some of them were 'at night', and actually quite a few projects over the years had this as a feature, which I find really badass; and that is that they are only accessible during certain hours. The second life beta grid in 2003 was only accessible from 10AM to 3PM. A good modern example is lowtech magazine's solar site. When the battery goes out, you can't get to the site. Also in a lot of the p2p web, when the host isn't online you don't get the files. That's awesome to me. We're spoiled with the 24/7 soykaf and it's a waste of energy, we need less of that, servers should go to bed. This way 'logging on' retains some of its ritual aspects, there is a time and a place set aside for it, it fits into human lives and it doesn't mess with your psyche.

>>34886 >how experienced are you with *nix server administration? 5 years in IT. My role requires some Linux admin, maybe like 10% of my time spent on that. >what is your preferred OS/distro (ultimately whoever actually pays for the thing gets to pick, but it would be good to know what people are comfortable with) Debian and Centos are the ones I've used but I'd be interested in openbsd or void. The existing documentation and development other tilde users have done seem to be for Linux so void could be good. https://tildegit.org/explore/repos >what services should the tilde definitely have (email, chat,. ...) Seconding a git repo, personal sites, and ebooks. Would be nice to have a repo of all books uploaded to lainchan easily accessible in one place. >what would you personally like to work on? Can help with setting up the system and uploading ebooks >how should we handle registration, moderation, deciding who gets sudo, etc? This has some good ideas https://tilde.town/wiki/administration.html Having a directory for admin curated scripts and simple binaries is not a bad idea but have to be careful to not make it a management nightmare, since these will have external dependencies.

I second the idea of CGI for personal home pages. For example, I might have multiple usericons that I want to use on a forum that allows remote, but only one, usericon; I could make a CGI process that gives a random usericon from a directory. I second the idea of different classes of privileges. >>[opt-in online-status listing] >You'd have to somehow hide the process tree, no? Since by default anyone can just look to see if you have an interactive session running. Is that difficult? Irregarding online-status privacy, there should be privacy about who's doing what how. A user would be able to access their own process tree, but would only be able to access other users' process tree if they have that special privilege. >Filesharing/piracy would be cool but potentially risky and video and music eats up a lot of server space. Some persons mistake file size as quality. Perhaps we could limit the movie/music storage space, to encourage smaller file sizes. For example, don't store that 20GiB bluray rip, when, as often is the case, there's a 700MiB reencoding that's just as good. And I could wax irate for hours about idiots who'd think FLAC, even if translated from MP3, is superior. We could probably host many carefully-sized music files. If at some point it's using too much storage, we might curate. I think a good community curation can be a good thing, because it can show a certain distillation of our tastes. If we have too much storage space for it, such curation might never happen, so I might propone reducing copycenter storage space until we must curate.

One minor/aesthetic feature I consider necessary is allowing usernames be arbitrary unicode strings. Another minor/aesthetic feature I consider necessary is allowing one to have multiple distinct usernames for different services e.g. email, usenet, chat, etc. If email is external, I'd like to have multiple email usernames, that are not obviously of the same person, so that I can give different correspondents different email addresses, which is important for identifying who leaked my email address e.g. when I start getting spam. I recently saw https://www.elfqrin.com/fakeid.php fake identity generator, which might be a cool type of service to provide, especially if the user can tune the dependence of variables. Filed under games? Of course: >This tool generates information from algorithms, it does not produce actual issued documents nor facsimiles, specimen or samples of real documents. Although.. Nah! Or could it? It would be really neat if there were something that made new ID cost no more than a pink slip. Gotta dream big.

>>34909 >some of them were 'at night' Dial-in used to be cheaper during night hours.

Maybe we've been thinking about this the wrong way. Maybe what we need are many small tildes. Maybe some of them will network together in some ways---that's for them to decide. Then, this thread should be to foster the creating/joining such small tildes. Or, maybe what we need is for individuals, on their own computers, networking with other individuals, in wondrously diverse ways. Actually using the different protocols.

>>34907 >I think a good way to handle this might be to have a sort of sub-admin tier which gets rw access to /usr/local or whatever but not actual root. Just sticky-bit some dirs, this will do the trick.

>>34886 >how experienced are you with *nix server administration? I use Linux as my main OS for around 3,5 years >what is your preferred OS/distro (ultimately whoever actually pays for the thing gets to pick, but it would be good to know what people are comfortable with) Debian >what services should the tilde definitely have (email, chat,. ...) Chat is probably the highest priority >what would you personally like to work on? I don't know if i am experienced enough to do anything >how should we handle registration, moderation, deciding who gets sudo, etc? The creator of the server and possibly some extra admins only should have have full sudo/su acess, if necessary add exceptions for some specific commands on sudoers to the users group.