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Hosting a Public Website on MS-DOS (2022)

fsturmat.net

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

#31

Post by sph »

fortran77 wrote: post #29
paxys wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Yeah. I eliminated a persistent bot attack on a webapp in minutes by simply adding a very easy question on user signup (like "what's 1+1?")

Security through obscurity is an overused concept: it doesn't work against determined humans, but on the greater internet, when your adversary are bots, it is extremely effective.

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

#32

Post by ryukoposting »

queuebert wrote: post #27
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/

Oh wow! I found him back in December. At that point, he hadn't updated the blog in over a year. Nice to see that he's active again.

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

#33

Post by pklausler »

queuebert wrote: post #24
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.

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 '…

I suspect what you’re trying to describe was the use of blank COMMON as a dynamic storage pool. The anonymous COMMON block begins at the address after the last named block.

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

#34

Post by finaard »

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.

Friend used to run his webservers on Amigas about two decades ago, back in a time where the time of hooking up an unpatched Windows system to a 100MBit connection would have it infected before you could start updating it. "Of course the webserver there is horribly insecure, as there haven't been new releases in years, but it's so obscure that none of the exploits work"

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

#35

Post by pwg »

voidUpdate wrote: post #8

A minor annoyance, I prefer to keep my mouse out of the way to one side when I scroll on a website, but if you have you mouse outside of the narrowest extremes of the columns on this website, scrolling does nothing. Otherwise an interesting writeup

Interesting.

Turn off the "overflow: hidden;" on the element and the "overflow-y: scrol;" on the element and the whole page will now scroll with your mouse anywhere. Of course this loses the "scroll within the small window" effect and instead everything now scrolls (except the toolbar, which can be fixed by turning off "position: fixed;" on the element).

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

#36

Post by basementcat »

lenerdenator wrote: post #20
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.

I was gonna be worried for a second, then I remembered that kind of person almost never lives a terminally-online, hacking-obsessed life. Phew. gets back to trying to convince his bank to send his data over plain FTP

Morning standup at a state-sponsored hacking organization…

Bob: A big round of applause to Fred and Jane for setting up that XZ back door! Boy that got us so much intel!

A round of polite clapping.

Bob: What’s your status, Igor?

Igor: Bah, my target is running web server on MS-DOS. I finally managed to hand craft 16 bit 8086 machine code exploit last night (mind you during Hacker News Hug of Death) and gain remote access to A: drive but it turns out secrets are actually hosted on Amiga 2000 on private LAN which I can ping but I don’t know 68k.

Bob: Fortunately we’re a state sponsored hacking organization so we have considerable resources. R.J., do you think you can help Igor?

R.J.: Sure! Igor, do you know if it has an OCS or ECS chipset? …

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

#38

Post by aftbit »

>Set up a port-forwarding rule that allows the host machine to access the VM's port 80 under "http://localhost:8080". (You can't forward port 80 directly, as it can only be made use of as root. I will also get back to this later.)

You could give the qemu binary the capability to bind low numbered ports as a non-root user:

    setcap 'cap_net_bind_service=+ep' $(which qemu-system-i386)
Or there's probably some arcane combination of systemd options to make it work just for that service. Maybe.

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

#40

Post by navanchauhan »

aftbit wrote: post #38

>Set up a port-forwarding rule that allows the host machine to access the VM's port 80 under " http://localhost:8080 ". (You can't forward port 80 directly, as it can only be made use of as root. I will also get back to this later.) You could give the qemu binary the capability to bind low numbered ports as a non-root user: setcap 'cap_net_bind_service=+ep' $(which qemu-system-i386) Or there's probably some arcane co…

For systemd version >= 229, this does the same:

  [Service]
  AmbientCapabilities=CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE
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