a bit of history about this site. yoss.canweb.net, this original shell system's name, was
primarily a unix shell account system.
it was a personal computer of mine which i ran from 1995 to 1997 that i had donated to National Online, an ISP startup that i was the
systems administrator for. it provided decent email support and did a good job on other
services too, services which we otherwise might not have had. i still believe any Internet Service Provider (ISP) should be able to offer at least basic unix services;
the Net was pretty much designed around unix, and for good reason. it is a powerful operating system (OS) that demands to be used.
my aim in providing that service was to allow people, including myself, to learn about unix in general. like any OS, you
are potentially learning new things about it constantly; unix is certainly no exception. in general, it takes longer to
learn unix than most other OSs because it doesn't make a vast number of assumptions for the user during the setup, and
the daily running of, the operating system itself. this means you have to tell it exactly what you want it to do,
whereas for an OS such as the Microsoft Windows family, there are many decisions made for the user about the way the system should be set
up and run, some of which you can't change yourself. some people find this pretty limiting and obtrusive, and unix is
likely a good development and/or general-use platform for these people.
in 2000 i became an independent network solutions integrator/contractor, and a provider of
online data storage facilities. i named the company after my main domain name and associated
hosting service, yossman.net.
although the original yoss.canweb.net machine no longer exists, i still administrate many unix shell servers for much the
same reasons -- secured, remote logins to "always-on" information storage systems are important to many people today.
the main audience expected for this site are people with unix shell accounts on this machine, so you can try to
get an answer to your question as opposed to waiting for an answer from me. ;-)
quick link to the yossman.net manpage online
search tool i'm making (reminder to finish).
this document last revised 2004-01-25 by yossman at yossman.net.
