A Brief History of My OpenBSD Shell Access

My first encounter with OpenBSD shell is devio.us. It’s been a long standing community with geeks. I don’t know if devio.us still opens for registration, but last time I visited the site, it seems that registration for new accounts is temporarily (or permanently) closed.

Then I found grex.org from shells-red-pills-eu listing. I signed up for an account. Nice shell on virtual machine, limited resources (i.e. still running i386 instead of amd64), with strict disk quota (i.e. 100 MB per user) and few logged in users. After some time, I tried to access grex.org shell account and it’s no longer possible since the shell account service of grex.org has been discontinued.

Before arriving at tilde.universe, I spent many hours of shell session at sdf.org. One day when checking email, I found an email from membership saying that a new machine named beastie is available for those preferring OpenBSD. I quickly gave it a try, logging in into beastie and it has the same nfs mount as other sdf clusters, so all my files from sdf are there.

After some time, when I tried accessing beastie, I could no longer use my ssh keys. After some investigation, I finally found that beastie is now restricted only to sdf arpa members. Well, nevermind. I am fine with the available netbsd hosts on sdf.

Found tilde.institute

Recently, I was looking for information about other shell access. From there, I found there are communities with simple static webpage called tildeverse. My curiosity leads me to find a curated list of tilde space and it got me to tilde.institute as candidate to sign up.

Finally, opening the sign up page. Filling the forms as requested. I am so glad that the signup form is requesting new users to upload ssh public key, and this is a very great improvement over my last experience on getting shell account which required new users to set up unique password for each shell account.

Enter tilde.institute

Well, after several days from my signup, I received an email saying that my account registration is accepted. I quickly fired up an ssh client, accessing tilde.institute, setting up my workspace at the shell to make me comfortable with the new environment.

I wish the best from the newly found tilde universe. Currently, my main focus is building my website from markdown text files using hugo.

Profit!

My thought that tilde.institute is similar to grex. There is clinte bbs system which operates similarly to grex’s bbs.

Well, I hope that tilde institute survive a long journey.