Hosting a Public Website on MS-DOS (2022) • Hacker News Board

Re: Hosting a Public Website on MS-DOS (2022)

#21

Post by jaza » Mon, Apr 01, 2024, 11:49 AM UTC

Makes my brain tingle in weird ways, reading different snippets of this article. Where it talks about "A:" being the floppy drive, suddenly I'm an early 90s kid again, learning the basics of my first home computer (an Olivetti 286 with MS-DOS and a green screen). Where it talks about proxying SSL with Caddy, fast-forward to being a 2010s web dev.

And I like the screenshot showing "Bad command or file name". I saw that message plenty of times, although now it seems like a lifetime ago!

Re: Hosting a Public Website on MS-DOS (2022)

#22

Post by jstanley » Mon, Apr 01, 2024, 12:39 PM UTC

ikari_pl wrote: post #16

jstanley wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote a web server for CP/M, the issue there was that the C library could only hold the state of a small number of FILE* at a time, because they were allocated statically.

I was thinking about cpm online software too! what hardware do you run it on? any links?

Sure. I ran it on an RC2014.

I have a blog post: https://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/rc2014-web-server.htm...

And a github repo: https://github.com/jes/cpmhttpd

Re: Hosting a Public Website on MS-DOS (2022)

#23

Post by paxys » Mon, Apr 01, 2024, 12:41 PM UTC

worldwidelies wrote: post #6

> Your server will be secure because it's obscure. But it's still very likely to become a target for autistic geniuses. I legit laughed out loud.

Nowadays there are armies of bots that will find an insecure internet-connected server within seconds. Security through obscurity isn't much of a thing anymore.

Re: Hosting a Public Website on MS-DOS (2022)

#24

Post by queuebert » Mon, Apr 01, 2024, 12:47 PM UTC

jstanley wrote: post #4

pixelesque wrote: post #2

> That's because DOS webservers can only keep track of 8- or 16-ish concurrent requests Is that because of the lack of official 'forking'/threading, or due to the limitations of whatever TCP stack is being used for the listen() / accept() calls? (or something else?)

I wrote a web server for CP/M, the issue there was that the C library could only hold the state of a small number of FILE* at a time, because they were allocated statically.

And even if heap allocated, there might be a static pointer array tracking them.

In the DOS days, dynamic memory allocation was to be avoided if possible. Machines did not handle running out of memory gracefully. Often we'd unnecessarily fix the size of things to avoid run-time uncertainty.

A scientific Fortran code I once saw allocated all of the memory it would need at the beginning of the code in an array called 'a'. Then from there it would dole out portions to other parts of the program using common blocks.

Re: Hosting a Public Website on MS-DOS (2022)

#25

Post by Tomte » Mon, Apr 01, 2024, 12:53 PM UTC

My operating systems professor hosted the whole institute‘s web site on his OS/2 desktop. That was fifteen years ago.

He was quite cool, he wrote his own simple message board for the lecture, and when students hacked it and wrote fake messages under his name, he took it in a sporting spirit, and the students reached an informal understanding with him: it‘s fine to post under his name if it is in another color than his (his name was red) or it‘s something like "NotProfName".

Re: Hosting a Public Website on MS-DOS (2022)

#26

Post by bitsandbooks » Mon, Apr 01, 2024, 1:00 PM UTC

Imagine how flabbergasted you'd be if you spent the time and effort to break into someone's web host, but all you found was MS-DOS.

Re: Hosting a Public Website on MS-DOS (2022)

#27

Post by queuebert » Mon, Apr 01, 2024, 1:03 PM UTC

ryukoposting wrote: post #19

I discovered Felix a couple months ago. It's a shame he has disappeared since making this blog post.

He posted two weeks ago. And the post from the link above is two years old. Your comment makes no sense.

https://fsturmat.net/blog/

Re: Hosting a Public Website on MS-DOS (2022)

#28

Post by sph » Mon, Apr 01, 2024, 1:22 PM UTC

paxys wrote: post #23

worldwidelies wrote: post #6

> Your server will be secure because it's obscure. But it's still very likely to become a target for autistic geniuses. I legit laughed out loud.

Nowadays there are armies of bots that will find an insecure internet-connected server within seconds. Security through obscurity isn't much of a thing anymore.

These bots you are talking about are not intelligent, they do not find "insecure" servers to break into. They simply brute-force and exploit known bugs on popular services.

There is no botnet targeting web services running on DOS, because no one is running web services on DOS.

Re: Hosting a Public Website on MS-DOS (2022)

#29

Post by fortran77 » Mon, Apr 01, 2024, 1:24 PM UTC

paxys wrote: post #23

worldwidelies wrote: post #6

> Your server will be secure because it's obscure. But it's still very likely to become a target for autistic geniuses. I legit laughed out loud.

Nowadays there are armies of bots that will find an insecure internet-connected server within seconds. Security through obscurity isn't much of a thing anymore.

These tend to try the top _n_ exploits on common ports. In fact, a little obscurity rids oneself from common attacks. I usually move my Wordpress admin access to a different port and URL and that really does stop scripts from trying exploits all day long. (Of course, I make sure everything else is set for security, too.)

Re: Hosting a Public Website on MS-DOS (2022)

#30

Post by sph » Mon, Apr 01, 2024, 1:25 PM UTC

Arbortheus wrote: post #5

> That's because DOS webservers can only keep track of 8- or 16-ish concurrent requests No different to my Python gunicorn web server then

On what hardware can DOS webservers run 8/16 concurrent requests?

I'd be surprised to see gunicorn do more than 1 request an hour on a 386.