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 lifetime (the-dam.org's life, not yours) access for 10€!

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 philosophy,
  • strive for software minimalism and elegance,
  • respect their users' privacy;
• the server provides a test bed for experimental software, for example ported from or inspired by 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 launched on <2023-04-21 Fri>, as of <2024-03-18 Mon> the following features are available:

• 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,

• git hosting,
• static and dymanic web hosting,
• finger (and therefore .plan) hosting,
• arbitrary service hosting on 12 TCP ports (this is done by adapting Plan 9's listen to Linux).

Documentation is being written on the go, see the Documentation index for a breakdown by topic. Popular articles inlcude:

• Tutorial: create a git repository
• Writing a secure privileged bash script
• A slack clone in 5 lines of bash

Upcoming features:

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

Stay tuned by subscribing to https://the-dam.org/rss.xml

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 lifetime (the-dam.org's life, not yours) access for 10€!