May 2023 - COFF - www.tuhs.org

C compiler in 512 bytes

by Warner Losh

This appeared in my news feed and hacker news. https://xorvoid.com/sectorc.html Warner

7 months, 2 weeks

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Bell Labs vs "East Coast" Management style of AT&T

by steve jenkin

I was wondering if anyone close to Early Unix and Bell Labs would offer some comments on the evolution of Unix and the quality of decisions made by AT&T senior managers. Tom Wolfe did an interesting piece on Fairchild / Silicon Valley, where he highlights the difference between SV’s management style and the “East Coast” Management style. [ Around 2000, “Silicon Valley” changed from being ‘chips & hardware’ to ’software’ & systems ] [ with chip making, every new generation / technology step resets competition, monopolies can’t be maintained ] [ Microsoft showed that Software is the opposite. Vendor Lock-in & monopolies are common, even easy for aggressive players ] Noyce & Moore ran Fairchild Semiconductor, but Fairchild Camera & Instrument was ‘East Coast’ or “Old School” - extracting maximum profit. It seems to me, an outsider, that AT&T management saw how successful Unix was and decided they could apply their size, “marketing knowhow” and client lists to becoming a big player in Software & Hardware. This appears to be the reason for the 1984 divestiture. In another decade, they gave up and got out of Unix. Another decade on, AT&T had one of the Baby Bells, SBC, buy it. SBC had understood the future growth markets for telephony was “Mobile” and instead of “Traditional” Telco pricing, “What the market will bear” p[lus requiring Gross Margins over 90%, SBC adopted more of a Silicon Valley pricing approach - modest Gross Margins and high “pass through” rates - handing most/all cost reductions onto customers. If you’re in a Commodity market, passing on cost savings to customers is “Profit Maximising”. It isn’t because Commodity markets are highly competitive, but Volumes drive profit, and lower prices stimulate demand / Volumes. [ Price Elasticity of Demand ] Kenneth Flamm has written a lot on “Pass Through” in Silicon Chip manufacture. Just to close the loop, Bells Labs, around 1966, hired Fred Terman, ex-Dean of Stanford, to write a proposal for “Silicon Valley East”. The AT&T management were fully aware of California and perhaps it was a long term threat. How could they replicate in New Jersey the powerhouse of innovation that was happening in California? Many places in many countries looked at this and a few even tried. Apparently South Korea is the only attempt that did reasonably. I haven’t included links, but Gordon Bell, known for formulating a law of computer ‘classes’, did forecast early that MOS/CMOS chips would overtake Bipolar - used by Mainframes - in speed. It gave a way to use all those transistors on a chip that Moore’s Law would provide, and with CPU’s in a few, or one, chip, the price of systems would plummet. He forecast the cutover in 1985 and was right. The MIPS R2000 blazed past every other chip the year it was released. And of course, the folk at MIPS understood that building their own O/S, tools, libraries etc was a fool’s errand - they had Unix experience and ported a version. By 1991, IBM was almost the Last Man Standing of the original 1970’s “IBM & the BUNCH”, and their mainframe revenues collapsed. In 1991 and 1992, IBM racked up the largest corporate losses in US history to the time, then managed to survive. Linux has, in my mind, proven the original mid-1970’s position of CSRC/1127 that Software has to be ‘cheap’, even ‘free’ - because it’s a Commodity and can be ’substituted’ by others. ================================= 1956 - AT&T / IBM Consent decree: 'no computers, no software’ 1974 - CACM article, CSRC/1127 in Software Research, no commercial Software allowed 1984 - AT&T divested, doing commercial Software & Computers 1994 - AT&T Sells Unix 1996 - “Tri-vestiture", Bell Labs sold to Lucent, some staff to AT&T Research. 2005 - SBC buys AT&T, long-lines + 4 baby bells 1985 - MIPS R2000, x2 throughput at same clock speed. Faster than bipolar, CMOS CPU's soon overtook ECL ================================= Code Critic John Lions wrote the first, and perhaps only, literary criticism of Unix, sparking one of open source's first legal battles. Rachel Chalmers November 30, 1999 https://www.salon.com/test2/1999/11/30/lions_2/ "By the time the seventh edition system came out, the company had begun to worry more about the intellectual property issues and trade secrets and so forth," Ritchie explains. "There was somewhat of a struggle between us in the research group who saw the benefit in having the system readily available, and the Unix Support Group ... Even though in the 1970s Unix was not a commercial proposition, USG and the lawyers were cautious. At any rate, we in research lost the argument." This awkward situation lasted nearly 20 years. Even as USG became Unix System Laboratories (USL) and was half divested to Novell, which in turn sold it to the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO), Ritchie never lost hope that the Lions books could see the light of day. He leaned on company after company. "This was, after all, 25-plus-year-old material, but when they would ask their lawyers, they would say that they couldnt see any harm at first glance, but there was a sort of 'but you never know ...' attitude, and they never got the courage to go ahead," he explains. Finally, at SCO [ by July 1996 ], Ritchie hit paydirt. He already knew Mike Tilson, an SCO executive. With the help of his fellow Unix gurus Peter Salus and Berny Goodheart, Ritchie brought pressure to bear. "Mike himself drafted a 'grant of permission' letter," says Ritchie, "'to save the legal people from doing the work!'" Research, at last, had won. ================================= Tom Wolfe, Esquire, 1983, on Bob Noyce: The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce | Esquire | DECEMBER 1983.webarchive http://classic.esquire.com/the-tinkerings-of-robert-noyce/ ================================= Special Places IEEE Spectrum Magazine May 2000 Robert W. Lucky (Bob Lucky) https://web.archive.org/web/20030308074213/http://www.boblucky.com/reflect/… https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=803583 Why does place matter? Why does it matter where we live and work today when the world is so connected that we're never out of touch with people or information? The problem is, even if they get da Vinci, it won't work. There's just something special about Florence, and it doesn't travel. Just as in this century many places have tried to build their own Silicon Valley. While there have been some successes in Boston, Research Triangle Park, Austin, and Cambridge in the U.K., to name a few significant places, most attempts have paled in comparison to the Bay Area prototype. In the mid-1960s New Jersey brought in Fred Terman, the Dean at Stanford and architect of Silicon Valley, and commissioned him to start a Silicon Valley East. [ Terman reited from Stanford in 1965 ] ================================= -- Steve Jenkin, IT Systems and Design 0412 786 915 (+61 412 786 915) PO Box 38, Kippax ACT 2615, AUSTRALIA mailto:sjenkin@canb.auug.org.au http://members.tip.net.au/~sjenkin

8 months, 1 week

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Re: [TUHS] Re: Unix game origins - stories similar to Crowther's Adventure

by Dan Cross

[TUHS to Bcc] On Wed, Feb 1, 2023 at 3:23 PM Douglas McIlroy <douglas.mcilroy(a)dartmouth.edu> wrote: > > In the annals of UNIX gaming, have there ever been notable games that have operated as multiple processes, perhaps using formal IPC or even just pipes or shared files for communication between separate processes > > I don't know any Unix examples, but DTSS (Dartmouth Time Sharing > System) "communication files" were used for the purpose. For a fuller > story see https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/DTSS/commfiles.pdf Interesting. This is now being discussed on the Multicians list (which had a DTSS emulator! Done for use by SIPB). Warren Montgomery discussed communication files under DTSS for precisely this kind of thing; apparently he had a chess program he may have run under them. Barry Margolin responded that he wrote a multiuser chat program using them on the DTSS system at Grumman. Margolin suggests a modern Unix-ish analogue may be pseudo-ttys, which came up here earlier (I responded pointing to your wonderful note linked above). > > This is probably a bit more Plan 9-ish than UNIX-ish > > So it was with communication files, which allowed IO system calls to > be handled in userland. Unfortunately, communication files were > complicated and turned out to be an evolutionary dead end. They had > had no ancestral connection to successors like pipes and Plan 9. > Equally unfortunately, 9P, the very foundation of Plan 9, seems to > have met the same fate. I wonder if there was an analogy to multiplexed files, which I admit to knowing very little about. A cursory glance at mpx(2) on 7th Edition at least suggests some surface similarities. - Dan C.

8 months, 2 weeks

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

by Dan Cross

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(a)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(a)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(a)ringlet.net roam(a)debian.org pp(a)storpool.com > PGP key: http://people.FreeBSD.org/~roam/roam.key.asc > Key fingerprint 2EE7 A7A5 17FC 124C F115 C354 651E EFB0 2527 DF13

8 months, 2 weeks

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Requesting thoughts on extended regular expressions in grep.

by Grant Taylor

Hi, I'd like some thoughts ~> input on extended regular expressions used with grep, specifically GNU grep -e / egrep. What are the pros / cons to creating extended regular expressions like the following: ^\w{3} vs: ^(Jan|Feb|Mar|Apr|May|Jun|Jul|Aug|Sep|Oct|Nov|Dec) Or: [ :[:digit:]]{11} vs: ( 1| 2| 3| 4| 5| 6| 7| 8| 9|10|11|12|13|14|15|16|17|18|19|20|21|22|23|24|25|26|27|28|29|30|31) (0|1|2)[[:digit:]]:(0|1|2|3|4|5)[[:digit:]]:(0|1|2|3|4|5)[[:digit:]] I'm currently eliding the 61st (60) second, the 32nd day, and dealing with February having fewer days for simplicity. For matching patterns like the following in log files? Mar 2 03:23:38 I'm working on organically training logcheck to match known good log entries. So I'm *DEEP* in the bowels of extended regular expressions (GNU egrep) that runs over all logs hourly. As such, I'm interested in making sure that my REs are both efficient and accurate or at least not WILDLY badly structured. The pedantic part of me wants to avoid wildcard type matches (\w), even if they are bounded (\w{3}), unless it truly is for unpredictable text. I'd appreciate any feedback and recommendations from people who have been using and / or optimizing (extended) regular expressions for longer than I have been using them. Thank you for your time and input. -- Grant. . . . unix || die

9 months, 2 weeks

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Western Electric Police?

by segaloco

Sorry this is very tangential to the list but figured some folks here might have some knowledge just what with our proximity to Western Electric lore by way of UNIX. Still, didn't feel UNIX-y at all so COFF instead of TUHS. Anywho, spotted something particularly interesting in my rounds of checking for eBay postings: https://www.ebay.com/itm/385635333789?hash=item59c9a8369d:g:8TMAAOSw3kJkblS… After the link is an auction for a police badge, with the word "Police" on it, but also labeled as "Western Electric, Co.", along with the seal of North Carolina. I did a bit of searching and while I could find plenty of WECo badges labeled security, plant protection, etc. I can't find any others specifically using the word "Police". The latter term has governmental implications that other terms do not, and it's got me kinda curious if there was ever a time WECo or the Bell System at large actually had authority from the government to accredit their own personnel as "police" and not simply as security, guards, etc. and what sort of legal statutes would be involved. I'm not interested in purchasing this either way, but it'd be amusing if this is some facsimile, I don't know that reporting it as such would bubble up through eBay's systems though. Also given the sensitivity of discussions of law enforcement these days, I'm simply interested in whether there is any accessible documentation or history of WECo and/or Bell's relationship with formal U.S. law enforcement agencies, not any discussion on the propriety of this. If you want to chat philosophy, email me privately, but that sort of public discussion is too sensitive for me to want to wade into in mixed company. - Matt G.

11 months

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Fwd: Useful Shell Scripts Network Connections , Logins and Block hacking attempts

by KenUnix

Useful Shell Scripts Network Connections , Logins and *Block hacking attempts* [image: image.png] #1. See how many remote IPs are connecting to the machine See how many remote IPs are connecting to the local machine (whether through ssh or web or ftp ) Use netstat — atn to view the status of all connections on the machine, — a to view all, -T Display only tcp connection information, ≤ n Display in numeric format Local Address (the fourth column is the IP and port information of the machine) Foreign Address (the fifth column is the IP and port information of the remote host) Use the awk command to display only the data in column 5, and then display the information of the IP address in column 1 Sort can be sorted by number size, and finally use uniq to delete the redundant duplicates and count the number of duplicates netstat -atn | awk '{print $5}' | awk '{print $1}' | sort -nr | uniq -c #2. Detect file consistency in specified directories of two servers Detect the consistency of files in specified directories on two servers, by comparing the md5 values of files on two servers to detect consistency #!/bin/bash dir=/data/web b_ip=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx #Iterate through all the files in the specified directory and use them as arguments to the md5sum command to get the md5 values of all the files and write them to the specified file find $dir -type f|xargs md5sum > /tmp/md5_a.txt ssh $b_ip "find $dir -type f|xargs md5sum > /tmp/md5_b.txt" scp $b_ip:/tmp/md5_b.txt /tmp #Compare file names as traversal objects one by one for f in `awk '{print 2} /tmp/md5_a.txt'` do #The standard is machine a. When machine b does not exist to traverse the files in the object directly output the non-existent results if grep -qw "$f" /tmp/md5_b.txt then md5_a=`grep -w "$f" /tmp/md5_a.txt|awk '{print 1}'` md5_b=`grep -w "$f" /tmp/md5_b.txt|awk '{print 1}'` #Output the result of file changes if the md5 value is inconsistent when the file exists if [ $md5_a != $md5_b ] then echo "$f changed." fi else echo "$f deleted." fi done #3. Detect network interface card traffic and record it in the log according to the specified format Detect the network interface card traffic and record it in the log according to the specified format, and record it once a minute. The log format is as follows: - 2019–08–12 20:40 - ens33 input: 1234bps - ens33 output: 1235bps #!/bin/bash while : do LANG=en logfile=/tmp/`date +%d`.log #Redirect the output of the following command execution to the logfile log exec >> $logfile date +"%F %H:%M" #The unit of traffic counted by the sar command is kb/s, and the log format is bps, so it should be *1000*8 sar -n DEV 1 59|grep Average|grep ens33|awk '{print $2,"\t","input:","\t",$5*1000*8,"bps","\n",$2,"\t","output:","\t",$6*1000*8,"bps"}' echo "####################" #Because it takes 59 seconds to execute the sar command, sleep is not required done #4. Iptables automatically blocks IPs that visit websites frequentlyBlock more than 200 IP accesses per minute - According to Nginx #!/bin/bash DATE=$(date +%d/%b/%Y:%H:%M) ABNORMAL_IP=$(tail -n5000 access.log |grep $DATE |awk '{a[$1]++}END{for(i in a)if(a[i]>100)print i}') #First tail prevents the file from being too large and slow to read, and the number can be adjusted for the maximum number of visits per minute. awk cannot filter the log directly because it contains special characters. for IP in $ABNORMAL_IP; do if [ $(iptables -vnL |grep -c "$IP") -eq 0 ]; then iptables -I INPUT -s $IP -j DROP fi done - Connection established over TCP #!/bin/bash ABNORMAL_IP=$(netstat -an |awk '$4~/:80$/ && $6~/ESTABLISHED/{gsub(/:[0-9]+/,"",$5);{a[$5]++}}END{for(i in a)if(a[i]>100)print i}') #gsub is to remove the colon and port from the fifth column (client IP) for IP in $ABNORMAL_IP; do if [ $(iptables -vnL |grep -c "$IP") -eq 0 ]; then iptables -I INPUT -s $IP -j DROP fi done Block IPs with more than 10 SSH attempts per minute - Get login status via lastb #!/bin/bash DATE=$(date +"%a %b %e %H:%M") #Day of the week, month, and hour %e displays 7 for single digits, while %d displays 07 ABNORMAL_IP=$(lastb |grep "$DATE" |awk '{a[$3]++}END{for(i in a)if(a[i]>10)print i}') for IP in $ABNORMAL_IP; do if [ $(iptables -vnL |grep -c "$IP") -eq 0 ]; then iptables -I INPUT -s $IP -j DROP fi done - Get login status from logs #!/bin/bash DATE=$(date +"%b %d %H") ABNORMAL_IP="$(tail -n10000 /var/log/auth.log |grep "$DATE" |awk '/Failed/{a[$(NF-3)]++}END{for(i in a)if(a[i]>5)print i}')" for IP in $ABNORMAL_IP; do if [ $(iptables -vnL |grep -c "$IP") -eq 0 ]; then iptables -A INPUT -s $IP -j DROP echo "$(date +"%F %T") - iptables -A INPUT -s $IP -j DROP" >>~/ssh-login-limit.log fi done Might come in handy... -- End of line

11 months, 1 week

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Re: [TUHS] BSTJ 1978 UNIX Issue Price Appreciation

by Adam Thornton

> On May 11, 2023, at 12:38 PM, Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote: > > I'm one of the many legacies of the over 50 years of teaching by Dan Siewiorek -- remember in the 1970s there was an infamous band (named after an interesting object BTW). Ah, so Dan Siewiorek is Steely Dan IV, _not_ from Yokohama. Or perhaps Steely Dan V, from neither Yokohama nor Annandale-on-Hudson. Adam

11 months, 1 week

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Latest Linux Rags

by KenUnix

*Latest Linux Rags* http://pclosmag.com/index.html?ref=itsfoss.com https://fullcirclemagazine.org/ Enjoy -- WWL 📚 Okey Dokey

11 months, 2 weeks

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Re: [TUHS] OT: Nostr Protocol.

by Angel M Alganza

On 2023-05-04 10:58, Ralph Corderoy wrote: > Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has been using it for a while. Not only has he been using it for a while already, but he's also contributing code and funding the developers of some projects (clients and relays) with 14 BTC through fiatjaf, Nostr creator. > I suggest any further chat about Nostr moves to coff(a)tuhs.org. CC'd. Cheers. Ángel

11 months, 2 weeks

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