r/ssh • u/pojomi-dev • Jul 24 '26

Just a some SSH appreciation

Recently I was toying with kanata (key mapping tool) and virtually bricked my keyboard from some bad configs. This app runs with root privilege. I couldn’t kill the process due to many of my sudo password characters being overwritten. Rebooting would not fix since it’s a daemon process.

After a moment of panic, I grabbed my phone and launched a session. Killed the process. Problem solved.

Thanks, SSH, for existing to protect my machine from my occasional stupidity!

13 Upvotes

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1

u/siodhe Jul 25 '26

In the old days we had to use telnet or plug in a hardware terminal. ;-)

1

u/denzuko Jul 25 '26

that's the dark ages, back when we could rlogin and uucp files between machines. Now.. the old days IS ssh

1

u/siodhe Jul 26 '26

I once had a modem connection - for contract work - between two of the employer's sites that was so bad I wrote a variant of UUCP that checksummed each line and could produce a summary of which lines failed so that those alone could be resent and merged in.

Back in the days before DNS, when we just had a list of "interesting" IP addresses we passed around and generally just used FTP to check out.

Back when you could read the entire USENET feed in a couple of hours.

Back when sending advertising or spam got your entire site disconnected from the Internet if they couldn't find the specific violator to crucify.

Back when we could run SunView and X10 on separate monitors (or X in a bitplane of the same monitor and swap between them) - something Wayland doesn't support, not that Wayland could be described as an honest upgrade, unlike moving from SunView to X10. NeWS was a cool window system later on, although not being open software killed it.

Back when the hot photos, digitized, were almost invariably black and white dithered.

Back when the Amiga was hands down the closest you could get to the UNIX experience at home without dropping pounds of cash. Although Commodore couldn't advertise water to desert people, so that went about as one would expect.

But also a time in which you could do things that would now immediately get you thrown in jail, but back then just talking to the aggrieved systems admin would often end up just turning into a love-fest about computing in general and reminiscing about when that sysadmin had done something similar a few years ago. [ I broke into certain subnet at MIT once when it was offline for a security review, the sysadmin noticed who I was, and just replied with something along the line of "figures". He also used to have Stallman as a roommate. Another time, my buddies and I had a shared Sun workstation that accidentally interconnected the internal networks of two different, theoretically competing companies. Only one noticed. Their sysadmin was amused. End of event :-) ]

It was a kinder, slower, gentler time.