Societas Machinarum offers shell access to worthy and unworthy individuals we know personally or by reputation. We don't charge anything for it, in exchange for which we only grant it to people we know won't abuse it. There are no disk quotas, but SCP transfers are rate-limited. You are welcome to request software installation and push the machines as hard as you like, but if your processes start to interfere with other uses / users of the system, we may ask you to run your jobs elsewhere or renice them.

To request an account, drop the admins a note telling us who you are and what you would like your username to be. PGP-signed requests get priority; PGP-encrypted requests are almost guaranteed to be granted.

If you have forgotten your login info (username, password, etc.), or otherwise cannot log in, contact the admins.

One thing to keep in mind is that our SSH servers implement a mechanism that denies further access to you if you've entered your password incorrectly more than three times. If you are having difficulties logging in to your account, you may need to have us re-authorize you. This is a simple process and you need only drop a line to the admins to let us know. Usually we'll be able to fix the problem within the hour.

First you'll need one of the following SSH clients to connect:

• Windows: PuTTY
• MacOS X: OpenSSH, perhaps with iTerm
• Unix: OpenSSH, or PuTTY

The hostname is "attrition.maleficarum.org". If you have kit hosted here, this is your access point. From here, you can ssh into your equipment.

The fingerprints for the SocMal shell server are:

1024 SHA256:zfLi4W4z0/bEy+HzjoUeFDtM5FjqfoEt5CSBKZer8sk root@attrition (DSA)
256 SHA256:P/KN5u9zf9tBSSrTsvW49nFkMbNDFccZTLRo36BAYoU root@attrition (ECDSA)
256 SHA256:ZVhsKPG6xcXed1Wyq8TRRAB20gX9s63r6OPr9a+y3lk root@attrition (ED25519)
2048 SHA256:JyAfBVqSmmusBlUFFeRCD9rKl3QIRSmOSzDpmb7N6Oo root@attrition (RSA)

You can now check these against DNS as well. Just configure your ssh client to do so (and see here for more info):

ssh -o VerifyHostKeyDNS=ask attrition.maleficarum.org
and
host -a attrition.maleficarum.org


You can also check the fingerprints on the server, like so:

user@attrition:~$ for i in /etc/ssh/*.pub; do ssh-keygen -lf $i; done


The public SSH host keys of the server are located here, for you to compare with your ~/.ssh/known_hosts file.

Changes in SSH host keys:

• ED25519 keys generated 31 Mar 2014
• keys regenerated 07 Jan 2011
• keys regenerated 18 Aug 2010