I am at heart a C programmer, this is sad.  One of the fathers of C hence Unix and so the grandfather of Linux has died.

DMR Denis M. Ritchie 1949-2011



Google+ post by Rob Pike
techcrunch.com

Free Bash shell

Sometimes you need to do things from another network off of your own box, having a free shell account elsewhere can help.  The lists of accounts and websites that offer supposedly free accounts can be difficult to wade through.  I just finished doing so and I found one that is easy to setup and use and it IS free, so I thought I'd share.

Instructions to get your account may be found here http://www.nvita.org/free-shells.aspx 

Unfortunately the website is running Micro$oft IIS* but the shell runs on Ubuntu.

Snippet from my session

youruserid@ubuntu:~$ uname -a

uname -a
Linux ubuntu 2.6.35-28-generic-pae #50-Ubuntu SMP Fri Mar 18 20:43:15 UTC 2011 i686 GNU/Linux
youruserid@ubuntu:~$ cat /etc/*release*
cat /etc/*release*
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=10.10
DISTRIB_CODENAME=maverick
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 10.10"
youruserid@ubuntu:~$ bash --version
bash --version
GNU bash, version 4.1.5(1)-release (i686-pc-linux-gnu)
Copyright (C) 2009 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later 

For those who are stuck on Windoze to ssh to the box you can use my favourites

• standalone Putty
• bitvise 
• installed original tunnelier installable
• standalone by 3rd party tunnelier portable

*Weirdly Netcraft what's that site runing reports it as running Microsoft-IIS/6.0  on FreeBSD that is a little disturbing.