Super Dimension Fortress, Learn UNIX on a nearly-free Shell Account

[Leo J Mauler]

Y'all might be interested in a place I found just the other day while
looking for ad-free web hosting.  It's called Super Dimension Fortress,
and what they are is a non-profit UNIX organization based in Minnesota
(since 1987!).  http://www.freeshell.org/

To keep out the spammers, they charge $1 for a basic shell account (SSH
including OpenSSH is supported for secure connections, type "man ssh" at
your Linux prompt).  That comes with 20MB E-mail box, 20MB file storage,
20MB webspace, and that is 60MB total, not the same 20MB used three ways.
 They're running NetBSD 1.6, which is more like UNIX than Linux (Linux is
"easier-to-use" UNIX; BSD never bothered being more than plain UNIX), but
most of the standard Linux stuff is there since its mostly GNU stuff
anyway.

Now, your $1 account doesn't grant FTP Access, just E-mail, and you can
still send yourself an E-mail with an attachment to transfer files into
the account. You also get a subdomain, yourname.freeshell.org, with no
ads, no banners, no popups.  And for really new beginners, it comes with
Pine preinstalled, which means the very easy Pico text editor is
available (most Linux distros don't come with Pine anymore and don't
preinstall the GNU Pico clone, Nano).  Pico works like the DOS EDIT
program, and users of Notepad in Windows will find the transition to a
text-only editor fairly easy.

You even create your own account (its a "prevalidated" limited account
until they get your $1 payment in the mail, but full access to all their
FAQs) by telnetting to "sdf.freeshell.org" and typing "new".

For FTP Access, you have to upgrade to the next account level, ARPA for
$36, which also ups your disk space to 100MB E-mail, 100MB file storage,
and 100MB webspace.  Thats the level I went to, and my wife has an ARPA
account there too for her artist website.  ARPA also gets you a
collection of other subdomains to choose from, I went with
webgiant.sdf1.org just because it is short.  ARPA also gives full access
to all development tools (Basic gives access to shell scripting and C
compiler; ARPA adds all the other languages, PERL, Python, etc.) which
means better CGI-BIN scripting.

Bot the $1 and the $36 are one-time fees for lifetime accounts.  And if
you "validate" your account up to ARPA right away, you only pay the $36,
no need to send $1 then $36.  They accept PAYPAL payments, but as PayPal
charges them a fee for accepting payments, they need $5 PayPal for the
Basic account.  Its the same $36 for validation at ARPA level through
PayPal (they'll eat the fee at that level of donation).

Anyway, they have an extensive collection of FAQs and other help files
right there on the site for learning UNIX, and their support people don't
mind answering questions not in the FAQs (or questions about where to
find something in the FAQs).  So you would be able to see how Linux
measures up to a more System V UNIX system.

One downside of both the Basic and ARPA accounts is that you do have
access to POP3 at those levels, but not SMTP.  So you can use Evolution
to *download* your E-mail from your SDF account, but to *send* any E-mail
requires that you log into the account on SDF and use something like Pine
to send mail.  You still have access to a procmail on the server, so you
can do anti-spamming before the mail even gets to your Evolution mailbox
on your Linux box.

This can be corrected with another paid service they have, VPM
($20/year).  VPM gives you access to their SMTP server and lets you grant
additional E-Mail boxes to other people in your family or organization,
up to 20 E-mail addresses off your chosen subdomain.  They have other
"donation levels" which give additional services like domain name hosting
($17/year), managing your own space (like taking your 100/100/100 ARPA
account space and making it 20MB E-mail, 50MB webspace, 230MB file
storage; just $20/year), creating a Majordomo mailing list ($30/year),
MySQL database access with an additional 100MB quota for the database and
access to crontab ($30/year), and others.  You have to upgrade to ARPA to
get all the additional paid services.

They're considering adding a dial-up service, nationwide, for about $14 a
month.  They used to have free dial-up from 1987 to 2000, but as more and
more people were telnetting and ssh-ing into SDF, they dropped dial-up to
save money.  Now they're looking into reinstating it as a paid service.

I like them a lot.  :)  I've been using their webspace for about four
months without a single problem.  No SMTP came as a bit of a surprise
(I'd thought that POP3 *meant* "SMTP included") but ssh-ing into their
server for E-mail isn't that much of an issue.  And it means learning
more than just Linux, it means learning essentially System V UNIX as
well, which will help out when one is trying to find work in the general
UNIX community.

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