Dan GoodinDid you or someone you know work with SSH back in the late 90s and early 2000s? I'd love to get some perspective on something. Please DM me by Signal.
Craig Askings@dangoodin as a user of SSH or a developer of the software?
Either would be great.
Kevin Lyda@dangoodin as a user, yes. The pre-OpenSSH ssh was not as nice.
How so?
joelitics@dangoodin @lyda I still have nightmares about seeding PRNG!
@dangoodin IIRC it didn't support user@host syntax and still did the rsh style -l user host syntax. Couldn't do per-host config.
Ian Stoba@lyda @dangoodin I still use the -l syntax at least 50% of the time just out of muscle memory.
Bill Ricker@lyda @dangoodin
Concur.
In the 200Xs, I had 2-3 versions of ssh on business desktop (Hummingbird X, MKS TK, Cygwin) plus Unix&Linux vendors' ssh on servers.
(I had MKS TK in '90s but did our servers do ssh? I fear mostly FTP or rsh/rcp still then alas.)
Concur.
In the 200Xs, I had 2-3 versions of ssh on business desktop (Hummingbird X, MKS TK, Cygwin) plus Unix&Linux vendors' ssh on servers.
(I had MKS TK in '90s but did our servers do ssh? I fear mostly FTP or rsh/rcp still then alas.)
@BRicker @dangoodin thankfully I've never had to use Windows so dodged that problem. It was the original ssh and then switched pretty quickly to OpenSSH once it showed up on Linux. And FreeBSD, Solaris and HP/UX IIRC. Maybe Tru64?
Joe Cooper 🇺🇦 🍉@lyda @dangoodin my fingers automatically type `-l user` unless I tell them otherwise.
init6@dangoodin I mean I used it but you can still just download the software yourself and use it. Like debian hamm from the 90s. https://www.debian.org/distrib/archive - I dunno that usage is much different just things are more secure, probably.
prozacchiwawa@dangoodin i did but really use it in the same way now as back then
jz.tuskI mean, I remember writing a shell script that invoked ssh-agent2 (on Solaris) somewhere around 2003. Does that count?
(But I don't have Signal, and the details are foggy by now.)
Luke Kanies@dangoodin message sent
I was only a user, but I did a bunch of stupid shit with it at the time.
Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven@dangoodin I think many of the BSD folks on the Fediverse can help with that. Boosted for visibility.
What I do remember, being in Europe, is the cryptographic export restrictions. Officially the RSA public keys were limited to 512 bytes, 3DES and RC4 being unavailable or restricted to 40/56 bits (depending on year). Don't think I ever saw IDEA being used due to the patents.
Similar problems with Kerberos 4 leading to eBones and Heimdall being a non-US implementation of Kerberos 5.
Osma A 🇫🇮🇺🇦@asmodai
Eh, ssh originated from Finland so it never was subject to export restrictions. The free version, anyway. Can't say for the commercial version, never used it.
Dan, I was in the same university with Tatu during the time he developed it. It became recommended, nearly mandatory tool very quickly.
@dangoodin
@osma @dangoodin Didn't the restrictions still apply to the ciphers used though? I know IDEA was an issue.
It's been 25+ years so I am definitely fuzzy on the keys from back then.
Bert Driehuis@dangoodin Are you looking for this? https://www.ssh.com/about/history/ It's an advertorial, but it comes from the horses mouth.
At the ISP I cofounded in 1993, we were acutely aware of the risks of shipping passwords in plaintext. In my recollection, the issue with remote terminals was fixed quickly with SSH. We had telnet disabled as soon as we got ssh to work. Fixing mail and other networked apps with SSL/TLS took way longer.
@dangoodin Regardless, the 6th Usenix symposium text from Tatu is at least useful to get an overview of its state in 1996: https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/sec96/ylonen/index.html
Aris Adamantiadis 
💲Paid@dangoodin hi, I wrote libssh in 2003, feel free to ask
Voline@dangoodin
You should talk to @mwl He literally wrote the book.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/ssh-mastery-openssh-putty-tunnels-and-keys-michael-w-lucas/8134776
Michael W Lucas 
Yep. And in the 1990s, I downloaded the RSA libraries to compile early SSH. Could poke you next week if you still need sources.
Chris Siebenmann@dangoodin I was a university sysadmin (University of Toronto) at the time SSH was released, and my memory is that we jumped on it basically immediately because it was clearly better than rsh/rlogin. Not only was it more secure, it also had X forwarding over SSH (a big help if you worked from Unix workstations, as was the case for us) and I think various other conveniences.
(We built it ourselves from source on our Unix machines, as was common at the time.)
Ax=b@dangoodin I've used it since 1999 but not sure if I'd have any special considerations to offer? Either way would be happy to help.
BogDrakonov@dangoodin Signal sadly still uses phone numbers for user ID. Any other methods you want to use for contact?
Alexander Bochmann@dangoodin Ylönen ssh was widely portable, as was customary at the time, and we used it on systems old and new - SunOS 4.1, NextSTEP, Solaris, HP-UX, BSDI BSD/OS, Linux, NetBSD, OpenBSD. I think OpenBSD in particular shipped ssh from the initial release - for the commercial UNIXes it was pretty much the second thing we would put on a new system after bootstrapping a recent GNU toolchain...
Before ssh became known to us, we used a bastion host with TIS FWTK and OTP logins for telnet-gw. It was still unencrypted, but at least it wouldn't give away a reusable password when you connected from the outside over the internet.
Michael Dexter
Kaito@dangoodin Did you or someone you love work with SSH back in the late 90s and early 2000s? You may be entitled to compensation.
@kai @dangoodin or at least discounted therapy
lorddimwit is now @I did, relatively extensively and on a variety of operating systems...but my memory is absolute trash, so there's that.
Patrick Townsend@dangoodin Sent you DM on Signal.
Hart of the Wud@dangoodin I started using it in 1996 when my Linux PC got hacked along with pretty much every other linux box on the campus dormitory network of my university. It was mostly made up of 10Base-T hubs so sniffing was guaranteed to get you a bunch of clear-text passwords.
SSH was an adjustment but it was much easier to deal with than kerberos, which we needed for imap and other stuff. It also came with cooler features than telnet, which immediately seemed like a naive thing from some early days of a smaller, kinder internet – a mythical time when people did not hack each other's computers not for technical reasons, but out of a sense of basic respect and politeness.
Laukidh@dangoodin I did. My first published article was about ssh chroot groups for security focus back in 2001.
Not sure how great my memory is of that time though.
Julia RezGetting the krb5 patchkit to build on HP-UX was always A Laugh (not actually a laugh)
However, the scrolling LED display of people using (and thus exposing their p/ws) ssh-1 on the camp network at WTH and/or SHA was a laugh.
caracabe@dangoodin “You may be entitled to compensation.”
🤘🦊🐧 Stefan Rower@dangoodin
I worked with SSH since 2002. But i don't use Signal.
I worked with SSH since 2002. But i don't use Signal.
Ken Brucker@dangoodin definitely used it during that period of time. After 2000 it would have been in a pure Solaris environment when I was with Sun. Used it before then too between some of the other Unix vendors but have no specific memories other than recalling there may have been interop challenges and some effort to work out X11 tunneling.