Quite a few people who emailed me told me they were specifically interested in learning linux; that they had installed ubuntu on a laptop but never touched the terminal, or that they had never touched linux and had to be showed how to login, etc. Because this is lesswrong, those people for the most part have actually done some stuff on their own instead of just never logging in again, but I feel like I could be doing more.
The value in learning the inner workings of an operating system should be self-evident, no matter how you scorn it. It is a human-designed self-contained deterministic purpose-driven system from start to finish, with many layers of complexity, which on its own is good enough reason for me, but after you spend an afternoon debugging something that went wrong with your ssh-agent, or with your .rtorrent.rc, you are going to understand those programs on a technical level instead of an intuitive level, and that does make a difference. It's also an option that Windows never gives you.
Sign up form: Click Here
I own a personal server running Debian Squeeze which has a 1Gb/s symmetric connection and 15TB per month bandwidth.
I am offering free shell accounts to lesswrongers, with one contingency:
You'll be placed in a usergroup, 'lw', as opposed to various other usergroups for various other communities I belong to, which will be in other usergroups. Anything that ends up in /var/log is fair game. I intend to make lots of graphs and post them on all the communities I belong to. There won't be any personally identifying data in anything that ends up publicly.
Your shell account will start out with a disk quota of 5g, and if you need more you can ask me. I'm totally cool with you seeding your torrents. I do not intend to terminate accounts at any point for inactivity or otherwise; you can reasonably expect to have access for at least a year, probably longer.
Fill out the form at the top of the page, query me on freenode's irc (JohnWittle), send me an email: johnwittle@gmail.com, or reply to this thread with your own contact information.
If you'd like to ask questions about the server, or what good such a service might be for you, point your IRC client at johnwittle.com and /join #shells (you should also do this if you sign up), or find me on freenode, or comment below.
Also, while the results of my analysis are likely to go in Discussion, I was wondering if this offering of free service itself might go in discussion. I asked in IRC and was told that advertisements are seriously frowned upon and that I would lose all my karma.I was told that this is not too similar to advertising, and that it would fly.Edit: As far as illicit activities go... I am precommitting here to fully cooperating with any law enforcement entities who approach me with regards to the server. By using the server, you are agreeing to abstain from any activities which will get me in trouble even if I cooperate fully with law enforcement.