Website hosted on a 24 year old Linux server • Hacker News Board

Re: Website hosted on a 24 year old Linux server

#71

Post by Aachen » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 6:16 PM UTC

hammyhavoc wrote: post #67

bombcar wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The chance that someone wants to connect to your ancient server from an ancient client that can't pass Cloudflare's DDOS protection is probably way higher than someone wanting to DDOS it. (For example, most people may not realize that Cloudflare DDOS basically makes the website inaccessible via TOR for many people.) Preemptive protection against attacks that never come makes the internet worse for everyone.

This old chestnut again, really? You can whitelist Tor without any issues on CloudFlare. It's one of the first things most people do. Read the documentation.

And service owners go out of their way to check the CF settings and opt in to the darknet... how often exactly?

It's implied with CF that you block people they can't track and prove to be innocent. Hence this old chestnut still existing: it's no joke.

Re: Website hosted on a 24 year old Linux server

#72

Post by yjftsjthsd-h » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 6:18 PM UTC

SoftTalker wrote: post #55

johnbellone wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like you could do this without a database using the Linux kernel inotify API. Every time a file is accessed trigger an increment. It’s too beautiful of a day outside to try this right now but an interesting brain teaser!

Pretty sure Linux didn't have inotify then. Probably a CGI script updates a counter in a file.

> Pretty sure Linux didn't have inotify then.

Did FUSE exist yet? You could hack it up in userspace...

(Have the HTML on a FUSE filesystem, and every time it gets a read it updates the HTML)

Re: Website hosted on a 24 year old Linux server

#73

Post by bombcar » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 6:20 PM UTC

Aachen wrote: post #71

hammyhavoc wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This old chestnut again, really? You can whitelist Tor without any issues on CloudFlare. It's one of the first things most people do. Read the documentation.

And service owners go out of their way to check the CF settings and opt in to the darknet... how often exactly? It's implied with CF that you block people they can't track and prove to be innocent. Hence this old chestnut still existing: it's no joke.

It's gotten somewhat better now that CF is using proof-of-work DDOS protection vs the older captchabullshit, but if you browse the web on Tor you will find LARGE numbers of sites that are CF blocking you.

(Props to HN, it works over tor)

Re: Website hosted on a 24 year old Linux server

#74

Post by prmoustache » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 6:23 PM UTC

hammyhavoc wrote: post #60

stronglikedan wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're just sitting outside, you may as well be inside.

My mood says otherwise.

Only if your laptop has some e-ink/e-paper tech screen really.

Re: Website hosted on a 24 year old Linux server

#75

Post by hammyhavoc » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 6:44 PM UTC

Aachen wrote: post #71

hammyhavoc wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This old chestnut again, really? You can whitelist Tor without any issues on CloudFlare. It's one of the first things most people do. Read the documentation.

And service owners go out of their way to check the CF settings and opt in to the darknet... how often exactly? It's implied with CF that you block people they can't track and prove to be innocent. Hence this old chestnut still existing: it's no joke.

You can even serve up websites via the Tor network instead of using exit nodes: https://developers.cloudflare.com/support/firewall/learn-mor...

If users choose to use a non-standard method to access a service that's not actively supported by the service provider, that's on the user.

Re: Website hosted on a 24 year old Linux server

#76

Post by hammyhavoc » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 6:46 PM UTC

prmoustache wrote: post #74

hammyhavoc wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My mood says otherwise.

Only if your laptop has some e-ink/e-paper tech screen really.

Sitting in the shade works for me, but yes, e-ink or STN works well (decades-old tech).

Re: Website hosted on a 24 year old Linux server

#77

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 6:49 PM UTC

hammyhavoc wrote: post #67

bombcar wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The chance that someone wants to connect to your ancient server from an ancient client that can't pass Cloudflare's DDOS protection is probably way higher than someone wanting to DDOS it. (For example, most people may not realize that Cloudflare DDOS basically makes the website inaccessible via TOR for many people.) Preemptive protection against attacks that never come makes the internet worse for everyone.

This old chestnut again, really? You can whitelist Tor without any issues on CloudFlare. It's one of the first things most people do. Read the documentation.

[deleted]

Re: Website hosted on a 24 year old Linux server

#78

Post by seba_dos1 » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 6:49 PM UTC

loo wrote: post #65

seba_dos1 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a guest book, you don't need anything like that. A simple solution could be to create a file for each entry. It's append-only anyway. For a view counter - yes, you can use a full blown database to concurrently increment a simple integer value; or, you could do it in a few lines of code by yourself too.

$ apt install redis-server $ redis-cli INCR hit-count

Still a huge overkill, and you need to properly set up persistence if you use it this way.

If you know that you'll need a cannon anyway, then sure, go for it, but when all we deal with are flies there's no reason to go that far. You could easily set up this kind of website on servers so simple that getting redis running on them would inflate their complexity quite considerably.

Re: Website hosted on a 24 year old Linux server

#79

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 6:55 PM UTC

bombcar wrote: post #73

Aachen wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And service owners go out of their way to check the CF settings and opt in to the darknet... how often exactly? It's implied with CF that you block people they can't track and prove to be innocent. Hence this old chestnut still existing: it's no joke.

It's gotten somewhat better now that CF is using proof-of-work DDOS protection vs the older captchabullshit, but if you browse the web on Tor you will find LARGE numbers of sites that are CF blocking you. (Props to HN, it works over tor)

[deleted]

Re: Website hosted on a 24 year old Linux server

#80

Post by squarefoot » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 7:02 PM UTC

jaclaz wrote: post #34

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #4

24 years is not actually THAT old... The cpu (AMD K6-2 300 MHz) is a lot faster than a raspberry pi 1 for many things, it has 512mb of ram, so for running a simple webpage, it should still work good enough. edit: especially with cloudflare infront of it...

Yes, around that time (circa 1999) there was the matchbox web server ar Stanford with much lower capabilities (as hardware): https://web.archive.org/web/19991128033948/http://wearables.... >The Matchbox Webserver, which is serving this and the other web pages to you, is a single-board AMD 486-SX computer with a 66 MHz CPU, 16 MB RAM, and 16 MB flash ROM, big enough to hold a useful amount of RedHat 5.2 Linux includin…

Thanks for posting this, I thought it was long gone and forgotten. That server at one time was kept live on the Internet, and I showed that back in the day during a talk to demonstrate Linux capabilities. The page however says it was created in 1999, while I seem to recall it was about one year before, but the server is that one without doubt: I could never forget that photo showing it side by side with the matchbox.