Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Hosting a Public Website on MS-DOS (2022)

fsturmat.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 54 posts

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

#41

Post by accrual »

Tomte wrote: post #25

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 hi…

Hah, what a cool professor! Running an OS/2 webserver and taking student's mischief in stride. Wish I could go back in time and learn from him as you did.

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

#42

Post by accrual »

This is so cool. I love the combination of bringing retro OSs into the present day and mixing them with modern technologies like hosting on AWS, etc. I never got the chance to experience writing code for DOS, but would love to try making a simple networked app in Borland or similar one day as a hobby project.

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

#43

Post by thfuran »

finaard wrote: post #34
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"

Did that time end? I'm pretty sure it's still a very bad idea to make a system with common serious vulnerabilities even briefly publicly reachable on ipv4.

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

#44

Post by thfuran »

sph wrote: post #31
fortran77 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It even works on determined humans. It's defeatable but dissuades many humans and slows down the rest. It is a useful layer in security. It just can't be the only layer.

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

#45

Post by aeyes »

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

A not quite so minor annoyance is that they also made the scrollbar invisible.

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

#47

Post by thfuran »

sph wrote: post #28
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 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.

>they do not find "insecure" servers to break into. They simply brute-force and exploit known bugs on popular services.

What exactly is the difference?

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

#50

Post by toast0 »

thfuran wrote: post #43
finaard wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

Did that time end? I'm pretty sure it's still a very bad idea to make a system with common serious vulnerabilities even briefly publicly reachable on ipv4.

If you install Windows XP from the release CD and attach it to the public internet, and let it sit, unless your ISP filters out the file sharing ports, I think it will get taken over fairly quickly. But windows vista and later don't make services available by default.

It's also very popular for ISPs to drop traffic on the windows file sharing ports, because it's almost all either malicious or at least unintentional.

Post reply on HN