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Simple Unix Chat

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Re: Simple Unix Chat

#121

Post by lelanthran »

revelio wrote: post #114
lelanthran wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But then more difficult questions arise: - Is the price of slack worth it, when the alternative is having more educated users that can do very basic command line calls ? I'm not sure that it would be difficult to wrap that up in a web interface running on a single server that does nothing but execute those command-line calls - auth, data and everything but session would be managed by the web server. You could perha…

That can be done just with an ssh:// URL handler. It already works on macOS, you can open terminals with an ssh session direct from web pages.

TIL :-)

I did not know that. Can confirm that it works in FF on Linux.

Re: Simple Unix Chat

#122

Post by ramses0 »

linschn wrote: post #70
ramses0 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cat /dev/audio | ...semi-unironically... (whoops, forgot the gzip/gunzip filters...)

I'm seriously considering trying something like this just to see if it works. TCP would kill it though (maybe?). But maybe UDP plus some clever ffmpeg invocation...

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/750015/send-alsa-au...

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=43896

(circa 2008 people were doing this... semi-unironically ;-)

Re: Simple Unix Chat

#123

Post by themoonisachees »

bryancoxwell wrote: post #103

I’ve always been really intrigued by the idea of building things as simply as possible and leveraging as many existing tools as I can to do so. My problem is that most of my projects require a web frontend which would mean calling bash scripts from Go (or whatever language I implement the server in). This just FEELS wrong, but I can’t really articulate why. Am I wrong to feel that way or is there some good reason I’m…

If your server is served by apache or ngnix, you don't have to call into PHP/other languages in order to return bash commands. You can define a route in which pages accessed are fed to a bash script and stdout gets piped back to the client.

Re: Simple Unix Chat

#124

Post by themoonisachees »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #82
CodeCompost wrote: post #80

5 lines of bash... ... and over 50 years of operating systems development.

and you still need to give ssh access to people just to chat :)

The aforementioned 50 years of OS development have given us facilities through which you can very tightly control what access you give to ssh clients, in a tried and tested way.

The authors are right when they say that sshd and unix users are probably the most frature-full auth scheme in existence.

Re: Simple Unix Chat

#125

Post by chias »

In general, composing Unix commands is a very powerful means to construct complex applications... poorly, with no real pathways to fixing their shortcomings. I believe the traditional "Unix Way" is to gloss over said shortcomings and pretend they don't exist, and when that fails, move the goalposts and argue that they don't exist "in the real world".

For example, what combination of shell commands can I use to output the number of files in a directory?

Hint: it's a trick question, you can't.

Re: Simple Unix Chat

#126

Post by pjlegato »

siilikuin wrote: post #119

Chapter 8 of The Linux Programming Interface mentions that applications running on Linux have basically 2 options for authentication: * Roll it themselves, maintain the database and all that jazz * Delegate it to the (very robust, very mature) Linux user authentication stuff Ever since reading that I've found myself wondering why more apps don't simply use SSH keypairs for authentication, given that they're already s…

SSH has supported MFA for decades: https://www.google.com/search?q=ssh+mfa

Re: Simple Unix Chat

#127

Post by themoonisachees »

linschn wrote: post #109
boffinAudio wrote: post #88

$ rain | wall #.. my favourite thing to do to my colleagues during the end of coding marathons we'd find ourselves in, during the 80's ... on machines that weren't always fortified against the rain .. ;){

I couldn't make talk or wall work on a modern linux system. That's a shame.

Just a few years ago in university the lab computers were running debian 10 and the sysadmin would make announcements about linux-specific infra outages through a script that ssh'd into every machine and wall'd the outage message.

We would often get people using lab computers remotely and you could talk or wall them to tell them you were rebooting soon. Good times.

Re: Simple Unix Chat

#128

Post by pjlegato »

numpad0 wrote: post #13

I think the intuition would be that if a determined "core" feature set of something is so easily and trivially reproduced, then it's not the core/source of its value. Which makes me wonder: Just how much of UI development had software engineering had consumed and automated since 1980s, or is it still in the realm of pure human art?

This is correct. The core value-add of e.g. Slack is not actually "transmit messages between authenticated users." There were dozens of other applications, both commercial and open source, that already did exactly that when Slack came out and killed them all off.

The core value proposition of Slack is next-level beyond that: it adds a visually appealing, highly intuitive UI/UX that almost anyone can sit down and immediately use, without any studying or setup or manuals or training. No technical skills are required. You don't need to understand anything beyond "type username and password"; the rest is self-explanatory.

Re: Simple Unix Chat

#129

Post by memetomancer »

chias wrote: post #125

In general, composing Unix commands is a very powerful means to construct complex applications... poorly, with no real pathways to fixing their shortcomings. I believe the traditional "Unix Way" is to gloss over said shortcomings and pretend they don't exist, and when that fails, move the goalposts and argue that they don't exist "in the real world". For example, what combination of shell commands can I use to output…

|For example, what combination of shell commands can I use to output the number of files in a directory? Hint: it probably isn't what you think it is, if it's even possible.

`find . -type f | wc -l`

Re: Simple Unix Chat

#130

Post by themoonisachees »

siilikuin wrote: post #119

Chapter 8 of The Linux Programming Interface mentions that applications running on Linux have basically 2 options for authentication: * Roll it themselves, maintain the database and all that jazz * Delegate it to the (very robust, very mature) Linux user authentication stuff Ever since reading that I've found myself wondering why more apps don't simply use SSH keypairs for authentication, given that they're already s…

If we really wanted MFA, we could roll a PAM module, and whatever pushes SSH authorized keys could also push MFA seeds. But IMO this would protect against very unusual attacks and annoy ssh agents users everywhere.
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