New Club Project: Public Access Linux System

[mav8557]

General Project Description

A public access system for RIT students, in the same vein as tilde.club and sdf.org.

Club members can sign up with a username and SSH key (SSH certificate?), and get a shell account with access to common utilities: text editors, interpreters, compilers, and a web root. Self-hosted services, especially terminal-based would be fun to host here.

Technical Details

• Automated installation: easy to deploy and rebuild
• Sign up with GitHub: Could pull SSH keys automatically from a GitHub username
• Appropriate resource limits, security measures, etc.
• Signup system: the rw.rs system of making a PR with your SSH key is a good way to introduce git, but this could be done over web or another channel.
• Documentation

Project Goals

Why do you want to start/bring your project into RITlug? Where do you see this project going?

I think this could add or improve a few things:

1. Shared server community: Linux is more fun with friends, and being able to communicate and work on these servers would be great. Not everyone has access to the CSH, CS, or other department machines and being able to run our own services is useful.

2. Easier beginner onboarding: Folks brand new to Linux wouldn't have to mess around with WSL, VMs, or separate shared systems to get command line access. We can run through demos and anything requiring a terminal on the same machine easily.

RFC

There are probably other benefits and considerations with this idea that should get taken into account, more interesting services and systems this could house. I'd love to hear what folks' ideas for this are and if there's interest how to go forward with this project.

[mav8557]

This should probably only be worked on after we assume responsibility for the servers, but I'm open to thoughts on this potential project after this is done. @Tjzabel @zethra @jzaia18