* [COFF] Re: [TUHS] the wheel of reincarnation goes sideways [not found] <CAP6exY+05fStBtpZGd2HeeNf21fNXeKUTwBV0h5-1YczwF+tew@mail.gmail.com> @ 2023-03-08 19:52 ` Dan Cross 2023-03-08 20:18 ` [COFF] " Tom Ivar Helbekkmo via COFF ` (2 more replies) 0 siblings, 3 replies; 24+ messages in thread From: Dan Cross @ 2023-03-08 19:52 UTC (permalink / raw) To: ron minnich; +Cc: COFF [bumping to COFF] On Wed, Mar 8, 2023 at 2:05 PM ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com> wrote: > The wheel of reincarnation discussion got me to thinking: > > What I'm seeing is reversing the rotation of the wheel of reincarnation. Instead of pulling the task (e.g. graphics) from a special purpose device back into the general purpose domain, the general purpose computing domain is pushed into the special purpose device. > > I first saw this almost 10 years ago with a WLAN modem chip that ran linux on its 4 core cpu, all of it in a tiny package. It was faster, better, and cheaper than its traditional embedded predecessor -- because the software stack was less dedicated and single-company-created. Take Linux, add some stuff, voila! WLAN modem. > > Now I'm seeing it in peripheral devices that have, not one, but several independent SoCs, all running Linux, on one card. There's even been a recent remote code exploit on, ... an LCD panel. > > Any of these little devices, with the better part of a 1G flash and a large part of 1G DRAM, dwarfs anything Unix ever ran on. And there are more and more of them, all over the little PCB in a laptop. > > The evolution of platforms like laptops to becoming full distributed systems continues. > The wheel of reincarnation spins counter clockwise -- or sideways? About a year ago, I ran across an email written a decade or more prior on some mainframe mailing list where someone wrote something like, "wow! It just occurred to me that my Athlon machine is faster than the ES/3090-600J I used in 1989!" Some guy responded angrily, rising to the wounded honor of IBM, raving about how preposterous this was because the mainframe could handle a thousand users logged in at one time and there's no way this Linux box could ever do that. I was struck by the absurdity of that; it's such a ridiculous non-comparison. The mainframe had layers of terminal concentrators, 3270 controllers, IO controllers, etc, etc, and a software ecosystem that made heavy use of all of that, all to keep user interaction _off_ of the actual CPU (I guess freeing that up to run COBOL programs in batch mode...); it's not as though every time a mainframe user typed something into a form on their terminal it interrupted the primary CPU. Of course, the first guy was right: the AMD machine probably _was_ more capable than a 3090 in terms of CPU performance, RAM and storage capacity, and raw bandwidth between the CPU and IO subsystems. But the 3090 was really more like a distributed system than the Athlon box was, with all sorts of offload capabilities. For that matter, a thousand users probably _could_ telnet into the Athlon system. With telnet in line mode, it'd probably even be decently responsive. So often it seems to me like end-user systems are just continuing to adopt "large system" techniques. Nothing new under the sun. > I'm no longer sure the whole idea of the wheel or reincarnation is even applicable. I often feel like the wheel has fallen onto its side, and we're continually picking it up from the edge and flipping it over, ad nauseum. - Dan C. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 24+ messages in thread
* [COFF] Re: the wheel of reincarnation goes sideways 2023-03-08 19:52 ` [COFF] Re: [TUHS] the wheel of reincarnation goes sideways Dan Cross @ 2023-03-08 20:18 ` Tom Ivar Helbekkmo via COFF 2023-03-09 1:22 ` [COFF] Re: [TUHS] " John Cowan [not found] ` <ZA+gxAePDMWK6StD@straylight.ringlet.net> 2 siblings, 0 replies; 24+ messages in thread From: Tom Ivar Helbekkmo via COFF @ 2023-03-08 20:18 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Dan Cross; +Cc: ron minnich, coff Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> writes: > About a year ago, I ran across an email written a decade or more prior > on some mainframe mailing list where someone wrote something like, > "wow! It just occurred to me that my Athlon machine is faster than the > ES/3090-600J I used in 1989!" Some guy responded angrily, rising to > the wounded honor of IBM, raving about how preposterous this was > because the mainframe could handle a thousand users logged in at one > time and there's no way this Linux box could ever do that. > > I was struck by the absurdity of that; it's such a ridiculous > non-comparison. I did one of those. Back in the early nineties, I had a 286 box running MINIX 1.5 as my home workstation, and a similar one running DOS at work. My job, however, was as one of a team of sysadmins caring for a VAX-780 running VMS. I used C-TeX to format documents on the DOS PC, and spent a couple of days porting it to the VMS C compiler. Performance was utterly dismal at first, but once I realized that the stdio stuff in the standard libary was the problem, I modified C-TeX to do output to binary files of fixed size 512 byte blocks in RMS, the VMS file system. In the small hours of the night, I discovered that the big and expensive VAX-780 was able to pretty much exactly match my 286-box when formatting documents. The very next day, I found that the same machine did the TeX formatting just as fast, while a hundred or so other people were actively using it for their own work. -tih -- Most people who graduate with CS degrees don't understand the significance of Lisp. Lisp is the most important idea in computer science. --Alan Kay ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 24+ messages in thread
* [COFF] Re: [TUHS] Re: the wheel of reincarnation goes sideways 2023-03-08 19:52 ` [COFF] Re: [TUHS] the wheel of reincarnation goes sideways Dan Cross 2023-03-08 20:18 ` [COFF] " Tom Ivar Helbekkmo via COFF @ 2023-03-09 1:22 ` John Cowan 2023-03-09 19:55 ` Dan Cross [not found] ` <ZA+gxAePDMWK6StD@straylight.ringlet.net> 2 siblings, 1 reply; 24+ messages in thread From: John Cowan @ 2023-03-09 1:22 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Dan Cross; +Cc: ron minnich, COFF [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 936 bytes --] On Wed, Mar 8, 2023 at 2:53 PM Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote: > > Now I'm seeing it in peripheral devices that have, not one, but several > independent SoCs, all running Linux, on one card. There's even been a > recent remote code exploit on, ... an LCD panel. > I remember at one time I had on my desk a PC with an 80x86 CPU and an Ethernet card that had an 80(x+1)86 chip inside. I think x=0, but I'm not sure. > But the > 3090 was really more like a distributed system than the Athlon box > was, with all sorts of offload capabilities. For that matter, a > thousand users probably _could_ telnet into the Athlon system. With > telnet in line mode, it'd probably even be decently responsive. > I find that difficult to believe. It seems too high by an order of magnitude. Another thing that doesn't get mentioned much is that classic mainframes had SRAM, so their memory bandwidth was enormous. [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 1910 bytes --] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 24+ messages in thread
* [COFF] Re: [TUHS] Re: the wheel of reincarnation goes sideways 2023-03-09 1:22 ` [COFF] Re: [TUHS] " John Cowan @ 2023-03-09 19:55 ` Dan Cross 2023-03-09 20:09 ` Larry McVoy 2023-03-11 23:28 ` Bakul Shah 0 siblings, 2 replies; 24+ messages in thread From: Dan Cross @ 2023-03-09 19:55 UTC (permalink / raw) To: John Cowan; +Cc: ron minnich, COFF On Wed, Mar 8, 2023 at 8:22 PM John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org> wrote: > On Wed, Mar 8, 2023 at 2:53 PM Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote: >> But the >> 3090 was really more like a distributed system than the Athlon box >> was, with all sorts of offload capabilities. For that matter, a >> thousand users probably _could_ telnet into the Athlon system. With >> telnet in line mode, it'd probably even be decently responsive. > > I find that difficult to believe. It seems too high by an order of magnitude. I'm not going to claim it would be zippy, but I do think it would work acceptably. Suppose that 1000 users telnet'ed into the x86 machine, but remained essentially idle; what resources would that consume? We'd have 1000 open TCP connections, a thousand shell processes, a thousand telnetd's, etc. All of that would consume some amount of RAM (though there'd be a lot of sharing of text and read-only data and so on), some VM space requiring RAM for paging structures and so on, some accounting data in the kernel, 1000 pseudo-ttys allocated, entries in the process table, etc. But, most of those shells would spend most of their time blocked waiting on input, so wouldn't consume CPU continuously, and similarly with the TCP connections mostly idle, the kernel is not generally wasting a lot of processor time on the login sessions. There'd be some bookkeeping data on disk, but that would be small. System overhead would amount to maybe a few megabytes, I'd imagine. If all of those users ran telnet in line mode, then the system isn't getting pounded with interrupts all the time, even if they're executing commands (the per-character overhead would be absorbed by the client). I don't think I have a machine of quite the Athlon vintage, but I _do_ have a machine with a Ryzen processor that's a couple of years old down in my basement. As an experiment, I wrote a little "expect" script to login to that machine a thousand times, doing so recursively: that is, the script starts off ssh'ing into the machine, and then in that session, logs in again, and so on, a thousand times, before finally going interactive. I used encryption, public-key authentication, and compression, and bounced through a "jump host" for each session, ensuring that I'm using the network for each login. The effect here is that typing into the final shell sort of simulates 1000 users typing simultaneously, complete with all the glorious interrupt and scheduler overhead that implies. Response time in that connection is not bad; certainly on par with the 3090 I used for a while in the early 90s. If I login in another window, it doesn't even register that there are a thousand "users" logged in, even if I'm running something chatty in the "thousand users" window. By contrast, the mainframe required a tremendous amount of offload support to shield the CPU from all of that bursty user activity. They made user actions look like block transfers, thus amortizing (much) of the overhead of interactivity. With the same load, the mainframe is storing some state data in memory regarding which users are logged in or connected or dialed or whatever, but the situation isn't that much different than mostly-idle telnet connections in line-mode: save that it's even more favorable to the mainframe in that much of the interaction is per-screen of data, as opposed to per-line. The difference in interactivity and offload is why I think the comparison is poor. If the mainframe handled user sessions the same way the x86 machine handled telnet logins, I imagine it would be swamped way worse than the AMD machine (or whatever it was that person was writing about 10 or 15 years ago). Perhaps a better comparison would be to a web server that was accepting HTTP requests from 1000 different clients. I'm quite sure that x86 machines of the Athlon era could cope with that load. > Another thing that doesn't get mentioned much is that classic mainframes had SRAM, so their memory bandwidth was enormous. I suspect this has less of a difference than one would hope when comparing against a modern machine. The specific comparison in this case was against an IBM 3090-600J. It appears to use SRAM for cache ("high speed buffer" in IBM-speak), but seems to use DRAM for central and expanded storage. In this reference I found on bitsavers, they make a big deal about their "one million bit memory chip", but that's DRAM (http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/3090/G580-1005-0_The_IBM_3090_Processor_Family_Jul87.pdf; see "IBM Advances the Technology" on page 10). Moreover, that machine supported up to 6 CPUs running at a clock rate of 69 MHz. That same reference says they could bring cycle times down to 17.2ns using ECL chips; DDR2 can match that. My Mac Studio blows it out of the water. For systems older than the 3090, I'm not sure that the SRAM difference matters much at all: those machines had tiny memories compared to even modern cell phones, and their CPUs and buses were pitifully slow. Even if they had more RAM bandwidth than machines now (which I do not think is really true), they couldn't use it. Indeed, I suspect their total memory sizes were smaller than L3 cache (which is SRAM) on modern machines. - Dan C. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 24+ messages in thread
* [COFF] Re: [TUHS] Re: the wheel of reincarnation goes sideways 2023-03-09 19:55 ` Dan Cross @ 2023-03-09 20:09 ` Larry McVoy 2023-03-11 20:32 ` Dan Cross 2023-03-11 23:28 ` Bakul Shah 1 sibling, 1 reply; 24+ messages in thread From: Larry McVoy @ 2023-03-09 20:09 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Dan Cross; +Cc: John Cowan, ron minnich, COFF On Thu, Mar 09, 2023 at 02:55:44PM -0500, Dan Cross wrote: > On Wed, Mar 8, 2023 at 8:22???PM John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org> wrote: > > On Wed, Mar 8, 2023 at 2:53???PM Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote: > >> But the > >> 3090 was really more like a distributed system than the Athlon box > >> was, with all sorts of offload capabilities. For that matter, a > >> thousand users probably _could_ telnet into the Athlon system. With > >> telnet in line mode, it'd probably even be decently responsive. > > > > I find that difficult to believe. It seems too high by an order of magnitude. > > I'm not going to claim it would be zippy, but I do think it would work > acceptably. > > Suppose that 1000 users telnet'ed into the x86 machine, but remained > essentially idle; what resources would that consume? We'd have 1000 > open TCP connections, a thousand shell processes, a thousand > telnetd's, etc. The early Unix code really did not like stuff like this. Lots of linear scans through what were assumed to be short lists. I still remember an SGI Challenge being brought to it's knees by a bunch of racks of modems. The same machine could move a ton of data but not when it was being forced through a zillion sockets. Linux seems well past that problem but it's possible that back in the Athlon days it still sucked. I pinged Linus, if he remembers when the kernel got taught to scale on sockets I'll report back. --lm ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 24+ messages in thread
* [COFF] Re: [TUHS] Re: the wheel of reincarnation goes sideways 2023-03-09 20:09 ` Larry McVoy @ 2023-03-11 20:32 ` Dan Cross 0 siblings, 0 replies; 24+ messages in thread From: Dan Cross @ 2023-03-11 20:32 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Larry McVoy; +Cc: John Cowan, ron minnich, COFF On Thu, Mar 9, 2023 at 3:09 PM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote: > On Thu, Mar 09, 2023 at 02:55:44PM -0500, Dan Cross wrote: > > On Wed, Mar 8, 2023 at 8:22???PM John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org> wrote: > > > On Wed, Mar 8, 2023 at 2:53???PM Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote: > > >> But the > > >> 3090 was really more like a distributed system than the Athlon box > > >> was, with all sorts of offload capabilities. For that matter, a > > >> thousand users probably _could_ telnet into the Athlon system. With > > >> telnet in line mode, it'd probably even be decently responsive. > > > > > > I find that difficult to believe. It seems too high by an order of magnitude. > > > > I'm not going to claim it would be zippy, but I do think it would work > > acceptably. > > > > Suppose that 1000 users telnet'ed into the x86 machine, but remained > > essentially idle; what resources would that consume? We'd have 1000 > > open TCP connections, a thousand shell processes, a thousand > > telnetd's, etc. > > The early Unix code really did not like stuff like this. Lots of linear > scans through what were assumed to be short lists. I still remember an > SGI Challenge being brought to it's knees by a bunch of racks of modems. > The same machine could move a ton of data but not when it was being > forced through a zillion sockets. Oh for sure I wouldn't try it on a VAX or PDP-11. I'm a bit surprised by the SGI thing, to be honest, but only a bit: as you say, I think that was just before the big push to make Unix really scalable. > Linux seems well past that problem but it's possible that back in the > Athlon days it still sucked. I pinged Linus, if he remembers when the > kernel got taught to scale on sockets I'll report back. Thanks, I'm curious what he says. - Dan C. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 24+ messages in thread
* [COFF] Re: [TUHS] Re: the wheel of reincarnation goes sideways 2023-03-09 19:55 ` Dan Cross 2023-03-09 20:09 ` Larry McVoy @ 2023-03-11 23:28 ` Bakul Shah 1 sibling, 0 replies; 24+ messages in thread From: Bakul Shah @ 2023-03-11 23:28 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Dan Cross; +Cc: John Cowan, ron minnich, COFF On Mar 9, 2023, at 11:55 AM, Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote: > > Suppose that 1000 users telnet'ed into the x86 machine, but remained > essentially idle; what resources would that consume? We'd have 1000 > open TCP connections, a thousand shell processes, a thousand > telnetd's, etc. All of that would consume some amount of RAM (though > there'd be a lot of sharing of text and read-only data and so on), > some VM space requiring RAM for paging structures and so on, some > accounting data in the kernel, 1000 pseudo-ttys allocated, entries in > the process table, etc. But, most of those shells would spend most of > their time blocked waiting on input, so wouldn't consume CPU > continuously, and similarly with the TCP connections mostly idle, the > kernel is not generally wasting a lot of processor time on the login > sessions. There'd be some bookkeeping data on disk, but that would be > small. System overhead would amount to maybe a few megabytes, I'd > imagine. Not the same but in 1995 at Real Networks our server s/w running on a 50Mhz or 100Mhz Pentium could handle 1000 TCP control connections (mostly idle) and 1000 UDP "streams", each sending 10 packets/second, which was the limiting factor. IIRC we had reduced per socket tcp send/recv buffer size to a small number. I don't recall now whether these machines had more than 16GB but we didn't want to tie up lots of memory in idle buffers. We got a real boost in traffic in Oct'95 when people all over the world wanted to know the verdict in O.J.Simpson's murder trial in real time! After that I added code for feeding live streams to any downstream servers so that theoretically a 3 level distribution tree can deliver live data to a billion people. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 24+ messages in thread
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* [COFF] Re: [TUHS] Re: the wheel of reincarnation goes sideways [not found] ` <ZA+gxAePDMWK6StD@straylight.ringlet.net> @ 2023-03-13 22:34 ` Dan Cross 2023-07-05 21:48 ` Dan Cross 0 siblings, 1 reply; 24+ messages in thread From: Dan Cross @ 2023-03-13 22:34 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Peter Pentchev; +Cc: ron minnich, COFF I don't know if a thousand users ever logged in there at one time, but they do tend to have a lot of simultaneous logins. On Mon, Mar 13, 2023 at 6:16 PM Peter Pentchev <roam@ringlet.net> wrote: > > On Wed, Mar 08, 2023 at 02:52:43PM -0500, Dan Cross wrote: > > [bumping to COFF] > > > > On Wed, Mar 8, 2023 at 2:05 PM ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com> wrote: > > > The wheel of reincarnation discussion got me to thinking: > [snip] > > > The evolution of platforms like laptops to becoming full distributed systems continues. > > > The wheel of reincarnation spins counter clockwise -- or sideways? > > > > About a year ago, I ran across an email written a decade or more prior > > on some mainframe mailing list where someone wrote something like, > > "wow! It just occurred to me that my Athlon machine is faster than the > > ES/3090-600J I used in 1989!" Some guy responded angrily, rising to > > the wounded honor of IBM, raving about how preposterous this was > > because the mainframe could handle a thousand users logged in at one > > time and there's no way this Linux box could ever do that. > [snip] > > For that matter, a > > thousand users probably _could_ telnet into the Athlon system. With > > telnet in line mode, it'd probably even be decently responsive. > > sdf.org (formerly sdf.lonestar.org) comes to mind... > > G'luck, > Peter > > -- > Peter Pentchev roam@ringlet.net roam@debian.org pp@storpool.com > PGP key: http://people.FreeBSD.org/~roam/roam.key.asc > Key fingerprint 2EE7 A7A5 17FC 124C F115 C354 651E EFB0 2527 DF13 ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 24+ messages in thread
* [COFF] Re: [TUHS] Re: the wheel of reincarnation goes sideways 2023-03-13 22:34 ` Dan Cross @ 2023-07-05 21:48 ` Dan Cross 2023-07-05 23:58 ` Grant Taylor via COFF 2023-08-01 9:49 ` Michael Cardell Widerkrantz 0 siblings, 2 replies; 24+ messages in thread From: Dan Cross @ 2023-07-05 21:48 UTC (permalink / raw) To: COFF On Mon, Mar 13, 2023 at 6:34 PM Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote: > On Mon, Mar 13, 2023 at 6:16 PM Peter Pentchev <roam@ringlet.net> wrote: > > On Wed, Mar 08, 2023 at 02:52:43PM -0500, Dan Cross wrote: > > > [bumping to COFF] > > > > > > On Wed, Mar 8, 2023 at 2:05 PM ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com> wrote: > > > > The wheel of reincarnation discussion got me to thinking: > > [snip] > > > > The evolution of platforms like laptops to becoming full distributed systems continues. > > > > The wheel of reincarnation spins counter clockwise -- or sideways? > > > > > > About a year ago, I ran across an email written a decade or more prior > > > on some mainframe mailing list where someone wrote something like, > > > "wow! It just occurred to me that my Athlon machine is faster than the > > > ES/3090-600J I used in 1989!" Some guy responded angrily, rising to > > > the wounded honor of IBM, raving about how preposterous this was > > > because the mainframe could handle a thousand users logged in at one > > > time and there's no way this Linux box could ever do that. > > [snip] > > > For that matter, a > > > thousand users probably _could_ telnet into the Athlon system. With > > > telnet in line mode, it'd probably even be decently responsive. > > > > sdf.org (formerly sdf.lonestar.org) comes to mind... > > I don't know if a thousand users ever logged in there at one time, but > they do tend to have a lot of simultaneous logins. 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: 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% 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. It's surprisingly zippy. - Dan C. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 24+ messages in thread
* [COFF] Re: [TUHS] Re: the wheel of reincarnation goes sideways 2023-07-05 21:48 ` Dan Cross @ 2023-07-05 23:58 ` Grant Taylor via COFF 2023-07-06 1:02 ` Dave Horsfall ` (3 more replies) 2023-08-01 9:49 ` Michael Cardell Widerkrantz 1 sibling, 4 replies; 24+ messages in thread From: Grant Taylor via COFF @ 2023-07-05 23:58 UTC (permalink / raw) To: coff 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. > 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. 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. > 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. Grant. . . . ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 24+ messages in thread
* [COFF] Re: [TUHS] Re: the wheel of reincarnation goes sideways 2023-07-05 23:58 ` Grant Taylor via COFF @ 2023-07-06 1:02 ` Dave Horsfall 2023-07-06 16:47 ` Grant Taylor via COFF 2023-07-06 2:35 ` Dan Cross ` (2 subsequent siblings) 3 siblings, 1 reply; 24+ messages in thread From: Dave Horsfall @ 2023-07-06 1:02 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Computer Old Farts Followers On Wed, 5 Jul 2023, Grant Taylor via COFF wrote: > > 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. Is there anyone else here who is not running a Unix box at home? FreeBSD is your friend... My box (aneurin.horsfall.org/aneurin.kfu) is a bit idle right now, but: 10:59AM up 146 days, 17:43, 5 users, load averages: 1.16, 0.65, 0.50 USER TTY FROM LOGIN@ IDLE WHAT dave v0 - 09Feb23 4:37 zsh dave pts/0 mackie.kfu 29Jun23 - w dave pts/1 mackie.kfu 29Jun23 7days tail -F /var/log/ma dave pts/2 mackie.kfu 29Jun23 7days tail -F /var/log/ht dave pts/3 mackie.kfu 29Jun23 1 zsh (Mackie of course is my MacBook) _ -- Dave ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 24+ messages in thread
* [COFF] Re: [TUHS] Re: the wheel of reincarnation goes sideways 2023-07-06 1:02 ` Dave Horsfall @ 2023-07-06 16:47 ` Grant Taylor via COFF 0 siblings, 0 replies; 24+ messages in thread From: Grant Taylor via COFF @ 2023-07-06 16:47 UTC (permalink / raw) To: coff On 7/5/23 8:02 PM, Dave Horsfall wrote: > Is there anyone else here who is not running a Unix box at home? FreeBSD > is your friend... I've got many /single/ user boxen at home (and elsewhere), both physical and virtual. I was specifically referring to /multiple/ user boxen. It seems to me that with the ease with which we can create (virtual) Unix boxen, the vast majority of them tend to be /single/ user or single purpose boxen. As such the proportion of /multi/ user boxen seems to be significantly reduced. So, to me, a /multi/ user boxen tends to stand out compared to the sea of /single/ user boxen. Grant. . . . ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 24+ messages in thread
* [COFF] Re: [TUHS] Re: the wheel of reincarnation goes sideways 2023-07-05 23:58 ` Grant Taylor via COFF 2023-07-06 1:02 ` Dave Horsfall @ 2023-07-06 2:35 ` Dan Cross 2023-07-06 4:18 ` Robert Stanford via COFF 2023-07-09 14:55 ` Michael Parson 3 siblings, 0 replies; 24+ messages in thread From: Dan Cross @ 2023-07-06 2:35 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Grant Taylor; +Cc: coff On Wed, Jul 5, 2023 at 7:59 PM Grant Taylor via COFF <coff@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. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 24+ messages in thread
* [COFF] Re: [TUHS] Re: the wheel of reincarnation goes sideways 2023-07-05 23:58 ` Grant Taylor via COFF 2023-07-06 1:02 ` Dave Horsfall 2023-07-06 2:35 ` Dan Cross @ 2023-07-06 4:18 ` Robert Stanford via COFF 2023-07-06 16:53 ` Grant Taylor via COFF 2023-07-09 14:55 ` Michael Parson 3 siblings, 1 reply; 24+ messages in thread From: Robert Stanford via COFF @ 2023-07-06 4:18 UTC (permalink / raw) To: coff On 6/7/23 09:58, Grant Taylor via COFF wrote: > > 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. I still have to occasionally manage a multi user SCO system with a bunch of dusty VT320's scattered through an old building, the original hardware is lost in space and it is now virtualised. There is even a couple of serial line printers. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 24+ messages in thread
* [COFF] Re: [TUHS] Re: the wheel of reincarnation goes sideways 2023-07-06 4:18 ` Robert Stanford via COFF @ 2023-07-06 16:53 ` Grant Taylor via COFF 2023-07-06 17:54 ` Adam Thornton 0 siblings, 1 reply; 24+ messages in thread From: Grant Taylor via COFF @ 2023-07-06 16:53 UTC (permalink / raw) To: coff On 7/5/23 11:18 PM, Robert Stanford via COFF wrote: > I still have to occasionally manage a multi user SCO system with a bunch > of dusty VT320's scattered through an old building, the original > hardware is lost in space and it is now virtualised. There is even a > couple of serial line printers. I administer a handful of physical Sun / Oracle boxen running Solaris at $DAY_JOB, each with a handful of local zones thereon. The local zones have multiple people logging and running an application. But these users aren't Unix users per-se. Rather they are running a singular line of business application (or very closely related / associated applications). This is vastly different than what I consider to be a shell box, wherein people do all sort of things on the system: - email - web - document processing - programming - etc It's the multiple users doing different things on a common box that seems so rare to me in 2023. Grant. . . . ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 24+ messages in thread
* [COFF] Re: [TUHS] Re: the wheel of reincarnation goes sideways 2023-07-06 16:53 ` Grant Taylor via COFF @ 2023-07-06 17:54 ` Adam Thornton 0 siblings, 0 replies; 24+ messages in thread From: Adam Thornton @ 2023-07-06 17:54 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Grant Taylor; +Cc: coff [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 611 bytes --] Multiple users doing different things on what _appears_ to be a common box has become pretty rare, I will grant (although that lovely Slack-in-five-lines-of-shell thing that was recently posted maybe here, maybe not, was very cute). But of course almost everything that's not happening inside your own house or your own on-prem data center is many, many, many users on a single box, each virtualized somehow (whether that be a classical VM, or a paravirt KVM guest, or just an OCI container) so each user has the experience of having a machine to themself. It's like it's 1967 again! Welcome to CP/40! Adam [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 733 bytes --] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 24+ messages in thread
* [COFF] Re: [TUHS] Re: the wheel of reincarnation goes sideways 2023-07-05 23:58 ` Grant Taylor via COFF ` (2 preceding siblings ...) 2023-07-06 4:18 ` Robert Stanford via COFF @ 2023-07-09 14:55 ` Michael Parson 2023-08-01 9:52 ` Michael Cardell Widerkrantz 3 siblings, 1 reply; 24+ messages in thread From: Michael Parson @ 2023-07-09 14:55 UTC (permalink / raw) To: coff On 2023-07-05 18:58, Grant Taylor via COFF 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. > >> 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). There's also nyx.net. I've had an account with them since it was nyx.cs.du.edu and was run on a Sun Sparcstation 10 and a Sparcstation 2 running SunOS 4.1.x. At some point in the late 90s/early 2000s, they moved to x86 systems running Linux. Looks like it has been running in AWS since 2016 or so. Currently is running on Ubuntu 20.04. Near as I can tell, they are still accepting new signups. I've been running this domain (bl.org) as a multi-user system for friends and family for a few decades. Started out on my Amiga 3000 running NetBSD 1.6 hanging off my ISDN line at home, then a friend donated his DEC Multia/Alpha system to the cause. When I changed jobs and lost the ISDN, I found a local colo and built a 1U x86 system which lasted for a few years, bouncing between colos as I found better deals, and is now a VM with Linode, still running NetBSD (8.1, need to update it one of these days). I think I'm down to about 3 active users these days, peaked at about maybe 8-10. Most of my users just use me for pop/imap/web mail that isn't one of the major free providers, though I also provide primary/secondary DNS and MX for a few domains run by friends. -- Michael Parson Pflugerville, TX ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 24+ messages in thread
* [COFF] Re: [TUHS] Re: the wheel of reincarnation goes sideways 2023-07-09 14:55 ` Michael Parson @ 2023-08-01 9:52 ` Michael Cardell Widerkrantz 0 siblings, 0 replies; 24+ messages in thread From: Michael Cardell Widerkrantz @ 2023-08-01 9:52 UTC (permalink / raw) To: coff Michael Parson <mparson@bl.org>, 2023-07-09 09:55 (-0500): > There's also nyx.net. I've had an account with them since it was > nyx.cs.du.edu and was run on a Sun Sparcstation 10 and a Sparcstation > 2 running SunOS 4.1.x. I'm still on a mailing list, Future Culture, that I subscribed to soon after it was created at Nyx back when it was a PDP-11. > I've been running this domain (bl.org) as a multi-user system for > friends and family for a few decades. Same here for hack.org. Currently 31 users logged in on my shellbox. Began as a dial-up BBS in the 1980s and then sort of grew. -- MC, https://hack.org/mc/ ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 24+ messages in thread
* [COFF] Re: [TUHS] Re: the wheel of reincarnation goes sideways 2023-07-05 21:48 ` Dan Cross 2023-07-05 23:58 ` Grant Taylor via COFF @ 2023-08-01 9:49 ` Michael Cardell Widerkrantz 2023-08-01 15:55 ` Dan Cross 1 sibling, 1 reply; 24+ messages in thread From: Michael Cardell Widerkrantz @ 2023-08-01 9:49 UTC (permalink / raw) To: COFF Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com>, 2023-07-05 17:48 (-0400): > 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. The tildes are a whole movement of public access *nix boxen. Here's a web page collecting a few of them: https://tildeverse.org/ They are a part of a larger Smol Internet movement: tildes, the Gopher revival, Gemini, et cetera. Of course they also have their own IRC network (tilde.chat), their own Internet radio station: https://tilderadio.org/ and phone network: https://tilde.tel/ SDF and Eventphone (I'm permanently on the EPVPN) also have their own phone networks, of course. Eventphone also runs their own DECT, GSM, and 3G networks during events, like the wonderful Chaos Communication Congress (C3) and the CCCamp (coming up soon!). -- MC, https://hack.org/mc/ ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 24+ messages in thread
* [COFF] Re: [TUHS] Re: the wheel of reincarnation goes sideways 2023-08-01 9:49 ` Michael Cardell Widerkrantz @ 2023-08-01 15:55 ` Dan Cross 2023-08-01 16:27 ` Grant Taylor via COFF 0 siblings, 1 reply; 24+ messages in thread From: Dan Cross @ 2023-08-01 15:55 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Michael Cardell Widerkrantz; +Cc: COFF On Tue, Aug 1, 2023 at 5:49 AM Michael Cardell Widerkrantz <mc@hack.org> wrote: > Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com>, 2023-07-05 17:48 (-0400): > > 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. > > The tildes are a whole movement of public access *nix boxen. Here's a > web page collecting a few of them: > > https://tildeverse.org/ > > They are a part of a larger Smol Internet movement: tildes, the Gopher > revival, Gemini, et cetera. Interesting. I don't really get the point of the Gopher revival, to be honest; sure, I get that people want non-graphical, non-ad-laden content, but it sure seems like you could get something like that with the web just using a text-mode browser like `lynx` or even `links` and something like `gomarkdown`. It's like the people who want to use Fidonet as an "alternative" to email. I mean, one can use the same protocols in parallel with the mainstream services. - Dan C. > Of course they also have their own IRC > network (tilde.chat), their own Internet radio station: > > https://tilderadio.org/ > > and phone network: > > https://tilde.tel/ > > SDF and Eventphone (I'm permanently on the EPVPN) also have their own > phone networks, of course. Eventphone also runs their own DECT, GSM, and > 3G networks during events, like the wonderful Chaos Communication > Congress (C3) and the CCCamp (coming up soon!). > > -- > MC, https://hack.org/mc/ ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 24+ messages in thread
* [COFF] Re: [TUHS] Re: the wheel of reincarnation goes sideways 2023-08-01 15:55 ` Dan Cross @ 2023-08-01 16:27 ` Grant Taylor via COFF 2023-08-02 16:07 ` Dan Cross 0 siblings, 1 reply; 24+ messages in thread From: Grant Taylor via COFF @ 2023-08-01 16:27 UTC (permalink / raw) To: coff On 8/1/23 10:55 AM, Dan Cross wrote: > Interesting. I don't really get the point of the Gopher revival, to be > honest; Retro? Reminiscence? > sure, I get that people want non-graphical, non-ad-laden content, > but it sure seems like you could get something like that with the > web just using a text-mode browser like `lynx` or even `links` and > something like `gomarkdown`. Presumably people are creating new content to use in the newer Gopher sphere, etc. So if people are creating new content, why can't they create the same content in simple no-add HTML. > It's like the people who want to use Fidonet as an "alternative" > to email. I mean, one can use the same protocols in parallel with > the mainstream services. I was pawing at FidoNet (or other FTNs) as an alternative to SMTP specifically because it was not SMTP. Not that anything's wrong with SMTP to prevent it's use. My interest is in the form of avoiding a single protocol failure. Grant. . . . ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 24+ messages in thread
* [COFF] Re: [TUHS] Re: the wheel of reincarnation goes sideways 2023-08-01 16:27 ` Grant Taylor via COFF @ 2023-08-02 16:07 ` Dan Cross 2023-08-02 20:58 ` Grant Taylor via COFF 0 siblings, 1 reply; 24+ messages in thread From: Dan Cross @ 2023-08-02 16:07 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Grant Taylor; +Cc: coff On Tue, Aug 1, 2023 at 12:28 PM Grant Taylor via COFF <coff@tuhs.org> wrote: > On 8/1/23 10:55 AM, Dan Cross wrote: > > Interesting. I don't really get the point of the Gopher revival, to be > > honest; > > Retro? Reminiscence? I guess? > > sure, I get that people want non-graphical, non-ad-laden content, > > but it sure seems like you could get something like that with the > > web just using a text-mode browser like `lynx` or even `links` and > > something like `gomarkdown`. > > Presumably people are creating new content to use in the newer Gopher > sphere, etc. > > So if people are creating new content, why can't they create the same > content in simple no-add HTML. Exactly. There are even pre-baked things one could put together that would serve much the same purpose. Going back to gopher et al seem like throwing out the baby with the bathwater. A small HTTP server that serves a little subtree of files on some random port and automatically renders markdown or something into trivial HTML is really all one needs. > > It's like the people who want to use Fidonet as an "alternative" > > to email. I mean, one can use the same protocols in parallel with > > the mainstream services. > > I was pawing at FidoNet (or other FTNs) as an alternative to SMTP > specifically because it was not SMTP. Tell that to the Fidonet people. :-) > Not that anything's wrong with SMTP to prevent it's use. My interest is > in the form of avoiding a single protocol failure. I don't see what the protocol has to do with it, but sure. - Dan C. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 24+ messages in thread
* [COFF] Re: [TUHS] Re: the wheel of reincarnation goes sideways 2023-08-02 16:07 ` Dan Cross @ 2023-08-02 20:58 ` Grant Taylor via COFF 2023-08-02 21:16 ` Dan Cross 0 siblings, 1 reply; 24+ messages in thread From: Grant Taylor via COFF @ 2023-08-02 20:58 UTC (permalink / raw) To: coff On 8/2/23 11:07 AM, Dan Cross wrote: > I guess? I'm not endorsing it. I have my own preferences that people question. > Exactly. There are even pre-baked things one could put together > that would serve much the same purpose. Going back to gopher et al > seem like throwing out the baby with the bathwater. A small HTTP > server that serves a little subtree of files on some random port > and automatically renders markdown or something into trivial HTML is > really all one needs. I always wanted something that would re-use the same content between multiple services. I can make the same file(s) available via: - FTP(S) - HTTP(S) Why can't I make the same file(s) available via Gopher too? I wondered if it might be possible to do some magic at the file system level where the same source file(s) could be used and add wrappers around it to integrate said source file(s) into rendered files served up via the various protocols. Obviously I've not yet been motivated to do anything with Gopher in this regard. I'd likely include a BBS interface in this menagerie if I could do so. For various $REASONS. > Tell that to the Fidonet people. :-) The last time I looked, much of Fidonet (proper) and other FTNs were still using the Fido protocol (nomenclature?) to communicate between nodes. There were a few offering SMTP gateways. Have more of them migrated to SMTP gateways where Fidonet is now more of a separate SMTP network? > I don't see what the protocol has to do with it, but sure. I should clarify that I view SMTP as used on the Internet today as a very large network of federated email servers speaking a common protocol. As such the network is largely interdependent on various other parts of the network, e.g. DNS. I was hoping that Fidonet (proper) as an FTN was still using Fido protocol (nomenclature) such that it was largely independent from the aforementioned SMTP network. Does the protocol separation make more sense now? Grant. . . . ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 24+ messages in thread
* [COFF] Re: [TUHS] Re: the wheel of reincarnation goes sideways 2023-08-02 20:58 ` Grant Taylor via COFF @ 2023-08-02 21:16 ` Dan Cross 0 siblings, 0 replies; 24+ messages in thread From: Dan Cross @ 2023-08-02 21:16 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Grant Taylor; +Cc: coff On Wed, Aug 2, 2023 at 4:58 PM Grant Taylor via COFF <coff@tuhs.org> wrote: > On 8/2/23 11:07 AM, Dan Cross wrote: >[snip] > > Exactly. There are even pre-baked things one could put together > > that would serve much the same purpose. Going back to gopher et al > > seem like throwing out the baby with the bathwater. A small HTTP > > server that serves a little subtree of files on some random port > > and automatically renders markdown or something into trivial HTML is > > really all one needs. > > I always wanted something that would re-use the same content between > multiple services. > > I can make the same file(s) available via: > > - FTP(S) > - HTTP(S) > > Why can't I make the same file(s) available via Gopher too? I'm sure you can if that interests you. I just don't see much of a point, personally. But if that's what you're into, get on down with it. > I wondered if it might be possible to do some magic at the file system > level where the same source file(s) could be used and add wrappers > around it to integrate said source file(s) into rendered files served up > via the various protocols. > > Obviously I've not yet been motivated to do anything with Gopher in this > regard. > > I'd likely include a BBS interface in this menagerie if I could do so. > For various $REASONS. I don't know why that wouldn't be easily doable in a server for each protocol. I believe that some BBS packages already do this, but I don't really know. > > Tell that to the Fidonet people. :-) > > The last time I looked, much of Fidonet (proper) and other FTNs were > still using the Fido protocol (nomenclature?) to communicate between > nodes. There were a few offering SMTP gateways. > > Have more of them migrated to SMTP gateways where Fidonet is now more of > a separate SMTP network? No. I think most of the actual Fidonet people are either waiting for the Big One and the collapse of the Internet, or arguing about how someone dissed them in 1989. > > I don't see what the protocol has to do with it, but sure. > > I should clarify that I view SMTP as used on the Internet today as a > very large network of federated email servers speaking a common > protocol. As such the network is largely interdependent on various > other parts of the network, e.g. DNS. > > I was hoping that Fidonet (proper) as an FTN was still using Fido > protocol (nomenclature) such that it was largely independent from the > aforementioned SMTP network. > > Does the protocol separation make more sense now? I thought I was rather clear that one could use the SMTP protocol independently of the existing email network, but sure. - Dan C. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 24+ messages in thread
end of thread, other threads:[~2023-08-02 21:17 UTC | newest] Thread overview: 24+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed) -- links below jump to the message on this page -- [not found] <CAP6exY+05fStBtpZGd2HeeNf21fNXeKUTwBV0h5-1YczwF+tew@mail.gmail.com> 2023-03-08 19:52 ` [COFF] Re: [TUHS] the wheel of reincarnation goes sideways Dan Cross 2023-03-08 20:18 ` [COFF] " Tom Ivar Helbekkmo via COFF 2023-03-09 1:22 ` [COFF] Re: [TUHS] " John Cowan 2023-03-09 19:55 ` Dan Cross 2023-03-09 20:09 ` Larry McVoy 2023-03-11 20:32 ` Dan Cross 2023-03-11 23:28 ` Bakul Shah [not found] ` <ZA+gxAePDMWK6StD@straylight.ringlet.net> 2023-03-13 22:34 ` Dan Cross 2023-07-05 21:48 ` Dan Cross 2023-07-05 23:58 ` Grant Taylor via COFF 2023-07-06 1:02 ` Dave Horsfall 2023-07-06 16:47 ` Grant Taylor via COFF 2023-07-06 2:35 ` Dan Cross 2023-07-06 4:18 ` Robert Stanford via COFF 2023-07-06 16:53 ` Grant Taylor via COFF 2023-07-06 17:54 ` Adam Thornton 2023-07-09 14:55 ` Michael Parson 2023-08-01 9:52 ` Michael Cardell Widerkrantz 2023-08-01 9:49 ` Michael Cardell Widerkrantz 2023-08-01 15:55 ` Dan Cross 2023-08-01 16:27 ` Grant Taylor via COFF 2023-08-02 16:07 ` Dan Cross 2023-08-02 20:58 ` Grant Taylor via COFF 2023-08-02 21:16 ` Dan Cross
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