Due to various reasons, we've decided to age out accounts, that see no
login activity on Thunix. We are a community, based around the usage
and learning surrounding UNIX and Linux systems.
What it seems some have taken that to mean is that it's a place to pop
up bots, and never be seen again.
There are other services, far more appropriate for this sort of thing,
specifically, not a shared environment, such as Thunix.
I do understand that this will come as a change to many, since
originally, Thunix.org was a open-ended shell provider, without much of
a mission other than that. Thunix, under the new staff, wants to build
more of a community, rather than a service provider.
To this end, we will be basing the cutoff on shell login times. In
order to keep your account active, you'll need to login into the shell
periodically. While you're logged in, check out the many service
available only via your shell account, such as iris, and the built-in
chat (weechat + IRC relay), etc.
If you have any questions, or concerns, feel free to email the list for
discussion, or email any of the current staff with them, and we'll get
back to you as quickly as we can.
Your Neighborhood Sysadmin;
Ubergeek/ub3g33k
Another month, another update!
Not too much to announce, as far as front end changes. New user requests should happen much faster now that we've written/stolen a tool from tilde.team that we can use to expedite user creation, and automation of a bunch of the steps we take to onboard users.
We're considering adding in user aging for accounts. Lots of accounts get created, and then never logged into. This can actually post a security problem for the system, as often times, accounts get created now, to be used months from today for botnets and the like. Let us know what your thoughts are on a reasonable time to age off users. At this time, I am personally leaning towards 180 days. Plenty of time to log into your shell, and use it a bit. And, once every 6 months isn't much to ask, since we expect members to actually contribute to the community, anyways.
We've terminated one account already for running a botnet member from here, and we'll keep a vigilant eye for any others.
This leads to another point: Just running a znc process doesn't count for login. Neither does checking your email. You'll need to actually log into the shell, in order to reset the counter. You should, anyways, since we have a lot of services internally, that we don't offer external access too :)
We are also looking at terminating the minecraft and minetest instances here. If anyone is using them, speak up now, or forever hold you peace! Not really. We wouldn't be deleting anything, just shutting down the processes, and removing them from the backup scheme.
We do need to welcome our newest sysadmin here: fosslinux. Give them a warm welcome if you see them around.
And again, any questions, or concerns, feel free to drop myself, or any of the other admins a line.
Ubergeek/ub3g33k
