Welcome to the tilde.institute! This is an OpenBSD machine whose purpose is to provide a space in the tildeverse for experimentation with and education of the OpenBSD operating system. Each user receives a subdomain! A variety of editors, shells, and compilers are installed to allow for development in a native OpenBSD environment. OpenBSD's httpd(8) is configured with slowcgi(8) as the fastcgi provider and sqlite3 available. This allows users to experiment with web development using compiled CGI in C, aka the BCHS Stack. In addition to php7.0 and mysql (mariadb) by request, this provides an environment where the development of complex web apps is possible.

Mailing list now available for tilde.institute! Web archive and subscribing information available here. From this point forward, the mailing list will be the primary means of communication between tilde.institute and users regarding announcements and critical issues. All messages from administrator Ben Morrison (ahriman) will contain an attached signature using this public key.

The list of compilers available are as follows:

We also provide non-HTTP access to various interpreted languages as well:

Your interactive shell can be changed with the chsh command. The shells available:

The IRC clients available by default are:

Feel free to contact ahriman via the mailing list or on chat in #institute if you need another compiler or shell available, or if you would like your homepage's index changed from index to something else (index.cgi, index.php, etc). I can also provide access to MySQL / MariaDB on a request basis.

News & Updates

2018 December 14

I dun goof'd again on the smtpd.conf syntax. All should be working again. I promise. I really promise this time.

2018 December 14

Apparently I dun goof'd and didn't allow smtp traffic in pf (OpenBSD's firewall). So now mail works as it should.

2018 December 10

New IRC bot in the works! I named it "skoolbot", it lives in #institute. So far it returns the uptime/load, manpages by search term, and lets you toot to the ~institute mastodon account via IRC.

I also hacked together a couple of scripts designed to aggregate both connected users and registered users, every 5 minutes and 1 hour respectively, and stitch together the info for a stats page.

2018 December 8

I installed a collaborative world-building game called holodeck! It runs like a MUD, without the combat. You explore and create areas, describing the areas as you go. It uses a central database, allowing all users of tilde.institute to collaborate on a single world.

2018 December 5

Changed up some of the styling on the main site. I also installed a fun game called botany which allows you to grow various plants on the console. Give it a try!

2018 December 3

Local mail delivery is now working! User subdomains will now be served via TLS. Since tilde.institute now satisfies the requirements, I've submitted it to the HSTS preload list.

2018 December 3

I just installed DokuWiki so users can record and share cool things to do and cool ways to customize their environment, etc. The link is with the other navigation links.

2018 December 2

If you have latency issues, mosh is available on tilde.institute as an alternative to ssh. Simply install mosh on your end, then issue "mosh user@tilde.institute" as you would with ssh. Make sure your home computer's locale (LANG, LC_CTYPE) is set properly to a UTF-8 encoding before attempting to use mosh.

2018 November 29

I've added nethack, angband, and zork for people to play. I've also fixed up a default weechat config for all users, and added a symlink for weechat called 'chat'. Updated /etc/motd to reflect the new stuff. I'll continue to add more things during the beta phase.