Shell Server Turn Down

[mly]

Likewise. Yesterday I added a simple HTML link and where I would have scp'ed a tar and untared it, now I made a directory, ftp'ed the index, made another directory and mftp'ed the images.
Is there an easier way using ftp to unzip/untar files?

As I wasted more than one trial-and-error hour of my life on this, for reference here's what I use for my one specific hosting case:

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lftp -e 'mirror --dry-run --verbose --reverse --no-recursion --include=".*[.](php|js|css)$" ~/LOCAL-DIRECTORY/ /home/WWW_pages/USERNAME/REMOTE-DIRECTORY/' USERNAME@ftp.sonic.net

Remove "

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--dry-run

" to make it actually do anything.
lftp is such a hammer-in-search-of-a-nail morass ("YOU HAD ONE JOB!") that you really really want to be super careful before you let it loose on anything.

Remove "

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--no-recursion

" if you wish to not not recurse. (I happen to not wish to, in my one simple particular use case.)

Replace or edit or remove "

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--include=".*[.](php|js|css)$

" for the files you wish to upload.

Yes, this is more complicated than "

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scp -p -r *.{php,js,css} ...

" but here we are in The Future in the 2020s, and everything is always getting far far far worse, rapidly. (Software, that is ... that whole trivial "fascism on top of death of the global ecosphere" business aside.)

[sjs]

tar cfp - dir | (ssh whosit@sh.sonic.net 'cd public_html; tar xvfp -')

In the beginning was the command line... sigh...

[pshipley]

This afternoon, June 28, I learned that the shell server is going down on Sunday June 30.
More notice would have been nice...

Every day to I use the shell to fetch and send mail with my sonic.net account to a linux machine at home and have been doing this for more than 9 years.

I use the shell to investigate DNS issues and other internet issues.

Yes, it was *very* convenient having a remote shell to test things from.

I also ran a small family webpage, sonic should reconsider their removal of this service/feature.

[sjs]

I agree but don't expect it to happen.

For maintaining your site you can still use some variant of ftp.

I said in a previous post that i believe those of us using ftp are just using it as a lobotomized form of a shell login. You can still move files around and see where things are but that's about it. So far, no one has disagreed with that assessment.

[fw]

I agree but don't expect it to happen.

For maintaining your site you can still use some variant of ftp.

I said in a previous post that i believe those of us using ftp are just using it as a lobotomized form of a shell login. You can still move files around and see where things are but that's about it. So far, no one has disagreed with that assessment.

That could be significantly improved by supporting sftp, which has multiple advantages over ftp:

• Since it's implicitly encrypted, you don't have to worry about which of the motley collection of clients supports SSL/TLS, and whether it insists on and/or informs you of its use.
• Since it does everything over a single connection, you don't have to worry about whether your NAT router has the necessary special handling (and whether you need to worry about "passive" vs. "active").
• Support for sftp almost certainly means that sshfs is also available, giving an experience fairly similar to operating on your files from the shell server.

That would probably go a long way toward addressing many users' issues, even though it doesn't bring back everything that could be done from the shell server.

Supporting key-based login wouldn't be mandatory, though doing so would be both more convenient and more secure.

[alexz]

Divide the cost of maintaining the shell by 100 users and let us know what our cut would be. We might be willing to pay it.

I appreciate the sentiment and question but it's honestly not a question about time spent maintaining it, it's about tech debt (or mental tax), distraction and focus. Shell users are an ever dwindling percentage of our customers and we've already gone well beyond the point where there was any justification other than sentimentality on our part to continue to support this service. As someone else commented they've been using shell.sonic.net for more than half of their life - I've been running it for more than half of my life!

We're all sympathetic to the workflow issues this causes for customer's that are using us for hosting services and understand if having shell access to maintain your website is a deal breaker for you.

Kelsey,

The only advice I can offer is: be careful about being so metrics driven. Remember when someone at HP thought it was a great idea to spin off their consumer PC business? Or when Southwest Airlines decided to abandon their open seating? People jumping ship to other airlines aren't doing so because other airlines offer open seating, they're jumping because Southwest open seating trumped whatever other advantages a different airline has. Without open seating Southwest eroded their competitive advantages and now customers will be looking closer at the disadvantages Southwest carries (e.g. pricing, WiFi, route network).

As for the shell server, I'm only checking the "labs" forum because the OpenVPN server was down. If there was any notice beyond the MOTD, I missed it. I'm almost certainly not among the hundred "hardcore" users you guys counted, but I did use the shell server periodically. As with Southwest, if y'all were nailing everything else perfectly this would be a blip on the radar. But you're not, and I stopped recommending Sonic years ago.