Remote access to OS/8 -- pitfalls

[Rick Adams]

I wanted to be able to access my OS/8 system remotely, so I put these lines in /opt/pidp8i/share/boot/0.script:

set console telnet=4000
set console telnet=buffered

Well, that worked just fine.  But I liked to run a PALD program I wrote to rotate bits through the accumulator when I wasn't doing anything else with the system, and I noticed that it seldom ran more than a day or two before crashing.

It turns out that exposing an OS/8 system to the internet at large isn't a good idea.  I got away with doing this with TSS/8, but there's no login required for OS/8 so all kinds of crazy bots were coming by with a flurry of hacker scripts that would crash my program.

Lesson learned, I guess.