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Unix Operating Systems Software

Locating Good Shell Accounts? 40

Posted by Cliff from the getting-your-/bin/bash-fix-after-college dept.
willis asks: "Several friends of mine will be graduating from college soon, and we're looking for a good place to get shell accounts with lots of space/bandwidth/reliability that we can do what we want with. We are currently considering two options: rolling our own by putting a box in a colocation facility, administering the box ourselves; or purchasing accounts from a commercial service. Our needs are: 20-30 users, 1-2GB/user, 0.5-1GB bandwith/user, FTP/HTTP/IMAP/SSH and expandable if neccessary. It seems like lots of people miss having good UNIX accounts after they leave school -- what is everybody else doing? Does anybody have any suggestions about good/cheap colos? Good account providers? Appropriate hardware?"
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Locating Good Shell Accounts? More

Locating Good Shell Accounts?

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  • Re:non-trivial (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    For Northern California/Bay Area (San Jose to Santa Rosa, and possibly further North/South), check out sonic.net (http://www.sonic.net [sonic.net]. They allow shell access, although bots and daemons are generally verboten. Disk space is limited to 50MB or so (you can pay for more), although co-location services are available. Wired and wireless DSL are available, as well as ISDN. You are limited to 100MB/day bandwidth, although you can pay for more. They're quite competent technically -- check out the motd on their web page.

    They're not the cheapest, though.

    Still, I'm a happy and satisfied customer (and that's my only connection with them).

    (Note that wired and wireless DSL aren't available in all areas. They depend on PacBell for getting the wired DSL line out to your home (but sonic, not PacBell, is the ISP), and the PacBell DSL lines are only available in certain areas. There also seems to be installation/scheduling "issues" (to say the least) with PacBell. The wireless DSL is only available in certain areas, and you need a direct, line-of-sight connection between the wireless DSL antenna on your home and the DSL tower.)

  • Hey, you forgot about io.com [io.com] in Houston and Austin. They also do strictly telnet[/ssh] accounts, and provide web space, anonymous FTP, and POP. They're a Linux shop with one host running FreeBSD.

    Never used them, but I know people who did, and were generally happy about it.

  • They're the oldest ISP and, IMO, still one of the best. I've had a shell account with them since circa 1990.
  • Actually, it's still sdf.lonestar.org... they just got the additional domain for clarity and advertising.

    They offer napster access too, btw.
  • It was a free service so I wasn't expecting too much.
  • Shell accounts are easy to find. You can get this with many web hosting accounts.

    The problem you will have is the 1-2 GB/account. That's going to cost a fair amount.
  • I'm pretty sure most places use switches for this type of environment -- meaning that ethernet packets destined for your machine won't get sent to any others.

    willis/
  • The problem with something like this is if the company goes under, or if you get laid off, your account might be frozen... We're looking for a something that'll last and last, no matter what the story around us is.


    willis/

  • Primenet.com still has shell account access and national dialup access. But they were bought out by Global Frontiernet or something. So new customers may not get shell access necessarily, but perhaps if you poke around they will give it to you.

  • Sniffing does happen. I have a bsd box co-located at our isp here and when i'm in the mood i kick that thing into promiscious mode and check to see what's going across the network. I also do bandwidth checks on my subnet to see who's hogging it (usually me). In theory, the boxes should be on a switch (which would totally cut down on this) but it's a small ISP and i don't think they are too interested in upgrading that piece of hardware. It's cheap so i don't care..

    -b
  • I can't say I recommend them much, since they no longer exist, but I was wondering if anyone here knew what exactly happened to them. They just suddenly disappeared without a trace one day...

    ---

  • Check out FutureQuest [futurequest.net].
  • In short, roll your own boxen. If you have enough money, just build a generic Linux box yourself, put on a good distribution, and share the problems of administrating it among yourselves.

    It's about as cheap of a solution as you'll find.

  • as a DSL ISP. All I really want from an ISP is an IP address, routing, and upstream bandwidth. I don't give a rat's ass about email servers or nntp servers, and the whiners who do nothing but piss and moan every time Outlook doesn't work exactly the way they think it should.
  • Have you thought about setting up a home machine and cable/DSL access? You could have your services running there, give access to whomever you wish, and even have other boxen in a NAT firewall behind it for whatever else you like. That's what I do, and I run various services for myself and a couple close friends, and it works out very nice, also because if something happens you don't have to call someone to reboot it (ie, colo box).
  • Of course, re-reading what you wrote, cable/DSL wouldn't meet your bandwidth requirement, but aside from that... :P
  • I would highly recommend Best Internet's shell services. At one point in time they had a massive SGI box but now they've broken it down into individual FreeBSD services. Best Internet has very good policies, as well as a local EFnet IRC server and a fast pipe. They are located in Silicon Valley I believe.

    I also used Primenet's shell services which are BSD/OS based. Their network is very solid and they have a lot of custom written software for locating and managing your account, terminal server login time usage, etc. Primenet also has an awesome newsfeed as they are a West Coast hub for a lot of the Usenet traffic. They also have one or two local EFnet IRC servers.

    Hope that helps!

    -Pat

  • Don't they let you keep your account(s) after graduation??



    Maybe you should make friends with a few of the admins around campus, and then get to keep your accounts anyways. :p


    --
  • On another note, if an ISP offers shell accounts or allows you to colo your own box, can the box that you have a shell on potentially be used to sniff the packets of all the other ISP users on your segment? Do they switch them or have some other way of dealing with this problem. If I have a dialup and my ISP has shell accounts, is it possible/more likely that some 31337 h4x0r d00ds are sniffing my packets?

    jeb.

  • BOFH (Score:1)

    by kipple ( 244681 )
    "Unfortunately, shells would often lock up on there, and more than once my ~ directory got deleted and I got no answer when I mailed admins about it."

    I understand where the BOFH ended up.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • In those areas of Texas, I recommend Illuminati Online [io.com]. They have a well-deserved rep for fighting the 1st Ammendment fight, having stood up to the Feds [io.com] once before.

    They aren't likely to merge/get bought out any time soon. And they DO give shell access, but I'm not so sure about the multi-GIG user space mentioned in the original request. That kind of shopping list sounds more like a co-loc than a conventional ISP to me.

  • I use corpex.com [corpex.com] - they provide a web hosting service so you can bung a few web pages up with telnet access and most of the stuff you're looking for, for a reasonable fee. If you do use them, tell 'em richardagreen at yahoo.com sent ya - maybe they'll give me a few $$$ for drumming up some business..... Cheers. Richard.
  • A friend and I are setting up a company that will include shell accounts on a Linux server. User data all stored on raid. We're currently doing setup and testing and waiting for the line to be installed. There's one there, but the company that provided it is pulling out of that business so it may or may not be there. My college also doesn't have much in the order of alumni services. My correct email is multics@sgeinc.com and we're starting to put together the web page at www.sgeinc.com. Suggestions of what people would like to see in a shell service would be welcome.

  • faradic.net (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    You have to hunt a bit, but there are plenty of places where you can get one.

    Faradic.net has an amazingly sensible price list [faradic.net] that includes background daemons, IRC bots, and the like.

    The one thing that is kind of limited is the disk space. The default ($9.95/month, $7.95 if paid annually) shell account only has 30 MB of quota, and additional space is ordinarily kind of dear ($0.25/MB/month), but I suspect that price just hadn't been adjustted lately and a few GB is negotiable.

    They appear to be allergic to hand-holding, but do keep things working just fine.

    Speaking of which, for a real change of attitude, see FlexNet [flex.com] in Hawaii. They offer zero tech support with attitude [flex.com]. You get a username, password, and phone number. Their NOC phone number is fairly easy to find, and they promise to hang up on you rudely if you call about anything except a problem at their end.

    This is kind of an irrelevant plug, because they don't offer shell service (AFAIK), and I'm nowhere near Hawaii. I just think anyone who starts their main web page with "So that things are clear to you, please read this Letter From a Disgruntled Customer. [flex.com]" is cool.

  • I don't know if your diskspace and bandwidth limits are met by them, but you can't beat the price.

    http://www.workspot.com

    They give VNC-accessible linux desktops. They allow you to install software locally too. Cool.
  • I've had fairly decent service with them in the back at a company I consulted for. There were a few issues (like when they put 64Mb of RAM in a box that was speced to 512...), but they have pretty good support and certainly have the bandwidth.
  • Disclaimer: I just got my Faradic account today, and in fact, I'm soaking in it.

    As for your comments about them, I have to say that 30 MB is actually pretty good, and 0.25/meg is standard. (1 GB / user is insane imo, btw.) I went searching for a new ISP over the weekend and I have to say most of what I found was very poor. I saw rates as high as $1/meg for extra space, most accounts had only 10-15 MB, and almost never a shell account. Some didn't even have a true 24/7 plan, some had max connection times, etc. Yech.

    I also have a FlexNet account. Cheapest vhost you can get that I know of. I don't even use the dialup access that comes with it, which is probably the bulk of their market. (Though I have had trying experiences with their technician/owner, which worked themselves out)

    I used to work for an ISP that offered shell accounts. I won't mention who, because a) they don't want to sell shell accounts (or dialup for that matter) anymore, and b) they laid me off on Friday. But I can tell you that they had very good rates, and Faradic's beats theirs.

    Only problem is that I had to wait three days for the account to be phone-verified and activated. Sigh, so much for realtime, but at least its here. (I suspect that it is a one-person operation or not much larger. I know FlexNet is. [Fine with me.]) But *all* Faradic accounts have shells -- its default.

    FWIW, a friend used to run a basement ISP that offered cheap shell accounts (he still might, mail me for info), and advertised that he would offer component colocation; i.e. you could send him a disk drive and that would be your quota. So, you could go get yourself a ##GB disk and send it to him to mount. Unfortunately I don't know if he ever actually got that service in place.

    Oh, and when I saw Faradic's special IRC charges, I was amused. Its a great idea. Unfortunately I doubt it helps Faradic's standing with EFnet ircops.

    -- Keith "She sells C shells at the Shore.Net" Tyler
  • i used to freeshell back when they were called sdf.lonestar.org. Theyre definitely cool guys. Unfortunately, shells would often lock up on there, and more than once my ~ directory got deleted and I got no answer when I mailed admins about it. Hopefully they've gotton better considering it's nice service, but I have moved on.
  • I have no idea what happened to them. they just up and disappeared. I used to chat with the admin, sedriss, and then *poof* he was gone. Very strange.
  • I'm getting a lot of php errors on that site. I hope it's just a temporary thing.
  • I'd reccommend getting a box at rackspace.com or something similar. they take care of the hardware and connectivity and stuff and give you root. It's about $200 - $300 a month depending on what extras you want. Works well for me.

    All your events [openschedule.org] are belong to us.
  • I have a shell account on toolshed51.com [toolshed51.com] The guy running that site has a Dual P3-800 box running linux and connected to a T1 line (maybe more???). The machine is really fast, he has tons of hard drive storage, and is very flexable on what you can run. Russ (the sysadmin) will also host your domain for you, etc. Shell accounts aren't listed on his price page, but if you send an email to support@toolshed51.com [mailto] they will be able to give you all of the information, including pricing...

  • Server4Me.com [server4me.com] has a $49/month leased server deal. For that, you get a P3-500, 64M, 8.4 gig (IDE), and FreeBSD 4.1. The bandwidth is done two ways. For $49/month you can get up to 3 gig transfer a month or a dedicated 56k. If it were 2 or 3 guys looking for a shell account and a box to screw around with, that's the best deal I've come across. If you want a serious server, this isn't the deal for you.

    I think in your particular situation, I would pass the hat, build a server, and co-locate it at a local ISP. (Hurricane Electric [he.net] has an acceptable reputation and OpenBSD Journal just moved to a co-lo there.)

  • That's cool. Of course most employers also say you can only use company resources for company business. I didn't get the sense that these guys are looking for a place to work after they leave work. In the era of broadband, the home solution may be the best for the most people...

  • Honestly finding an ISP with a decent shell is next to impossible. You probably are better off running your own box--- if that's allowed under the colo agreement. And if you can afford it.

    But there are benefits to having someone else deal with the headaches, especially on days with new viruses.

    Most of the decent shell ISPs are gone now, sold out to huge conglomerates. Mine has been sold 4 times in the last 1.5 years, lately to a Japanese company (it started out in California). I'll be first to admit that my shell account now is -way- better than the account I had in college. But I'm still shopping around for a new provider.

  • One starting point for finding a provider of a shell account could be www.colosource.com They have a database of over 500 National and International colocation providers. Just an Idea, Kevin

  • Here is what I have done: (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 12, 2001 @09:17PM (#436029)
    I simply called all of the ISPs in the phone book until I got one that said "Sure, we do shell accounts." In Austin, realtime.net is pretty cool and outer.net is very cool, in Houston, insync.net is very cool (despite being purchased by Enron). I have liked applink.net in Dallas so far (a Linux shop and very security conscious), but they don't offer shell accounts. With DSL and my home machines, though, that is less of an issue -- the additional analog line that got for the DSL works great with my old modem, and I had an extra ISA slot free in the dual-homed box that I use for my NAT box so I can dial in when I am on the road. I was somewhat bandwidth-constrained with ISDN (not really, just sometimes) and so I wasn't that happy doing so at the time, but with DSL that limitation is gone. So, I just keep ssh up and use my own box. I suspect that applink would be cooperative if I wanted a dedicated box, but all I have now is a DSL connection.

    Another was to get around the "no shell" rule is also to get a "business" account -- they are usually a lot better with those in being cooperative. And they fix the hardware when it breaks!

    As to the "make friends with the sysadmins" idea, well, that works until everyone graduates and they review the hidden "never delete" sudo list. Suddenly, you get a nastygram and the account goes away. Bummer. Best to do the pruning yourself and keep up with your own stuff. Yes, that means storing tapes off-site from your house and doing your own backups, but you ARE an adult now, right?

  • Freeshell.org (Score:3)

    by lil_billy ( 25771 ) on Monday February 12, 2001 @09:28PM (#436030)
    The hardware requirements don't sound very reasonable on your end, unless you're willing to pay out the nose.
    Freeshell's got good stuff going on, and is -- FREE. As in beer.
    If you want to use FTP, etc, it's $36 for a lifetime membership.
    I love it.

  • reviews ? (Score:3)

    by Quazion ( 237706 ) on Tuesday February 13, 2001 @08:55AM (#436031) Homepage
    www.shellreview.com should service your needs..

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