nullroute | services

Also see hosts and network.

Nullroute doesn't run anything serious, it is just a place for experiments; infrastructure for the sake of infrastructure. This means that servers come and go, the services are often misconfigured, the only account is "grawity", and there really isn't anything worth offering.

But I've learned a lot by simply tinkering around with various network services. And it's much easier to study a working implementation than hundreds of pages of RFCs, so that's what I'm doing here.

Public things

See also: network, dn42, telebahn.

I sometimes grab copies of various old websites or FTP sites (frequently just weeks before they go down). A few of those are accessible as mirrors.

There is a local Git server hosting some of my hobby projects (mainly ones which are not fit for GitHub) as well as various infrastructure and this website itself.

Also a few miscellaneous pages:

• finger – web gateway to the Finger service
• ident – Ident service test page
• xkcd – redirector for xkcd:// URIs

Internal services

Other things that may or may not be running at any particular moment:

• authentication: BrowserID, Kerberos, LDAP, RADIUS, SAML, TACACS
• crossrealm: NULLROUTE.EU.ORG.LT ⇒ {CLUENET.ORG, KYRIASIS.COM}
• directory: [o=Nullroute]; [dc=nullroute,dc=eu,dc=org]
• storage: git-annex, NFSv4, SMBv3, OpenAFS, backups of backups of backups
• messaging: Gale and XMPP
• network: dn42, IPv6, LISP (xTR), various VPNs, AS206633
• pki: X.509 (NullCA), OpenSSH (SSH CA)
• web2.0: FOAF, WebFinger

A few services in detail:

Kerberos

Most services in this network use Kerberos or GSSAPI authentication when possible. There might be cross-realm trust links with other sites.

LISP

For a while, participated in the LISP Beta Network, an experimental pull-based alternative to BGP that could be described as "DNS but for routing tables". The LISP test network was dismantled in 2020.

OpenAFS

There's an AFS3 cell accessible at /afs/nullroute.lt. It has almost no files (unlike many other AFS cells that have publicly accessible homedirs with 3 decades' worth of files), it's just… there, primarily as an exhibit of late 1980s infrastructure. I would really like to get DCE DFS (aka AFS4) working as well.

IMAP

There used to be a small collection of Usenet and mailing-list posts which was accessible through anonymous IMAP at imap://anonymous@<host>/Public/Unix (similar to the IETF list archive), but it was shut down to simplify things. This service worked through a combination of a "public" namespace being present in the IMAP tree and the SASL ANONYMOUS mechanism being listed in Dovecot's auth_mechanisms.

NFSv4

Home directories on any "core" server can be accessed from any other server, or from my workstations, via /net/foo/home/grawity or simply /n/foo. The former is implemented via AutoFS, while the /n shortcut is done as a tiny fuse.slashn filesystem.

Aug 2022