[dvlug] Michael Paoli @ DVLUG this evening

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Michael Paoli (Michael.Paoli at cal.berkeley.edu):

> And "slides":
> http://www.rawbw.com/~mp/linux/ssh/ssh.odp
> (LibreOffice Impress format)
> 
> The podcast was brief introduction/ovewview.  There's
> fair amount of additional information and resources/references
> on the "slides".

I see that one of your slides links to my 'SSH-Protocol Software for
Sundry Platforms' pages at http://linuxmafia.com/ssh/ .  You might be
amused to hear the story of how that came about:

Some time in the early 2000s, I was reading an ongoing discussion on the
UC Santa Cruz 'SlugLUG' discussion mailing list.  One of the UCSC guys
was talking about how the university was completely unable to cease
using the telnet daemon for remote login across the campus network.
(For context, campus LANs/WANs are notoriously about the _worst_ place
to be insouciant about security threats.)  

The cited reason for not changing over to ssh:  Somebody on the campus was 
still using OpenVMS, and there wasn't any client-side ssh
implementation, so sadly they remained stuck on telnet and putting
everyone's security credentials at absurd risk of theft and abuse.

I thereupon took about ten seconds to Web-search the matter, and
immediately found _two_ separate ports of the entire SSH suite, client
and server, to OpenVMS.

D'oh.

I of course posted my result to the SlugLUG list, and even had the
forebearance to avoid saying 'You didn't actually _look_, did you?'
But then I spent about two hours doing the same research for every
single OS platform I could think of, all the way down to PalmOS, 
finding and creating a write-up concerning every last one of them.

The initial page was a single-piece unholy mess, of which the lower half
of the http://linuxmafia.com/ssh/ page (the link farm, really) is a
remnant.  After a few years, I refactored most of the content to
subpages, to make it less fugly.

Anyway, that's the story:  I wanted to be able to say 'No, see $URL'
if I ever heard again the inane argument 'We're forced to use plaintext
telnetd for security-sensitive remote login because there's no ssh
support for $OBSCURE_OS .'