[COFF] [TUHS] Re: the wheel of reincarnation goes sideways

[Dan Cross]

On Wed, Jul 5, 2023 at 7:59 PM Grant Taylor via COFF <coff at tuhs.org> wrote:
> On 7/5/23 4:48 PM, Dan Cross wrote:
> > I thought some folks here might find this interesting.  Someone else
> > today reminded me of tilde.town, which is a publicly accessible
> > machine running Linux. They have a shocking amount of use:
>
> O.o?
>
> > tilde% hostname
> > tilde.town
> > tilde% uname -a
> > Linux tilde.town 5.15.0-58-generic #64-Ubuntu SMP Thu Jan 5 11:43:13
> > UTC 2023 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
> > tilde% uptime
> >   21:38:01 up 156 days, 17:15, 454 users,  load average: 3.82, 4.40, 4.19
> > tilde%
>
> Well I'll be.  Someone is running a multi-user Unix system.  That's
> something I've always wanted to do or find someone doing.

There are a bunch of such systems.  https://sdf.org/ has been doing it
for decades now, as has M-Net and formerly Grex (which got shut down
on April 15 of this year).

> > Not quite a thousand users logged in simultaneously, but half that. If
> > one counts the number of processes associated with pseudoterminals,
> > it's more (I guess a lot of users are running tmux and/or screen).
>
> :-)
>
> > The system is also surprisingly modest: 6 cores, 16GiB of RAM and
> > about 1TB of storage.
>
> I can't yet tell if that's six logical CPUs or more.  x86_64 cores
> /could/ have hyper-threading et al. and more logical CPUs.

This was from the output of `top` and `htop`; if SMT is in use, Linux
generally reports those as separate LPs, so I'm going to assume that
if it only lists 6 CPUs, there are only 6 logical processors (either 6
cores with SMT disabled or 6 virtual CPUs; I don't know if it's a VPS
or what).

> But still, six contemporary CPUs could be a lot of computing power.
>
> 16 GB of memory is nothing to sneeze at, especially for running commands
> in a CLI environment.  --  I'm assuming no daemons saying FEED ME RAM.

I think they run a fairly robust web presence including a Mastodon
server and some other stuff as well; I see postgresql running, a bunch
of other random stuff. Curiously (or not) no SMTP service. I'm told
they run a Gopher server, which seems like a waste of time to be, but
hey: to each their own.

> > It's surprisingly zippy.
>
> I applied for membership.  I'll be interested to see if I'm granted
> logon permission.  :-)
>
> Thank you for sharing Dan.

Have fun!

        - Dan C.