The Dam: a Guix public access server

The Dam is a PubNix –a public access UNIX server–: a computer running the GNU Guix operating system, shared by different people over the internet.

Get access for 10€/year !

Also the The Dam is an experiment in shared and distributed computing:

• the server runs services most people turn to corporate social media giants for: text messaging, link sharing and commenting, activity feed sharing; the dam services, by contrast,
  • follow the UNIX and suckless philosophy,
  • respect their users’ privacy;
• the server provides a test bed for experimental software, for example ported from the Plan 9 operating system to Linux, managed by Guix; the resulting distributed computing environment blurs the boundary between client and server ;
• the community offers training sessions and challenges.

To quote dmr, one of the co-creators of UNIX, writing about what they wanted to preserve from Multics to what would become UNIX:

What we wanted to preserve was not just a good environment in which to do programming, but a system around which a fellowship could form. We knew from experience that the essence of communal computing, as supplied by remote-access, time-shared machines, is not just to type programs into a terminal instead of a keypunch, but to encourage close communication.

–Dennis M. Ritchie, The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System

The Dam also draws inspiration from the tildeverse.

The Dam just launched on <2023-04-21 Fri>, offering the following features:

• access to a shell on the system, with Guix configured with the official and beaverlabs channels,
  • the latter lets you install, among other things, the tools from the plan 9 from user-space project,

• suc, the Simple Unix Chat.

Upcoming features:

• web, gemini, gopher, finger, .plan hosting;
• roll9, the UNIX tabletop role playing engine;
• privacy respecting link sharing, commenting, voting, and personalized recommendation.

Features come and go as the community adopts or eschews them.

Adding users is a manual process. Actual access will be granted a few hours (72 at most, but usually much sooner) after the membership fees are paid.

Get access for 10€/year !