GHOST SHELL

Generally speaking I don't like cloud computing, for all the usual 
grumpy-techie reasons. Of course it all boils down to the old idea 
of remote access that the Tildes are built around, and I obviously 
don't find that so offensive, but at the same time my account on 
Aussies.space is really just for anonymous content hosting on 
Gopher. I've played around with using it for practical tasks, and 
there are a couple of other things that I started using it for, but 
in general as I'm always using a Linux system which I have full 
control over there's usually not much point.

However a few months ago I finally succeeded (and it took some 
trying I tell you) in signing up for one of these free VPS offers 
that big cloud-computing services have been offering. It's the best 
one too, in my opinion, because so far they claim it won't expire. 
It's with Oracle Cloud, and although I don't like the company, and 
setting it up how you want involves wading through lots of weird 
Oracle mumbo-jumbo while watching to make sure you side-step all 
their paid features, I can't help but be impressed by what you can 
get for nothing. I mean, for $0 I've probably got more computing 
power in the VPS than _any_ physical system I've ever accessed! 
Granted that's because I'm cheap and never use other people's 
computers anymore, but it's still equivalent to some pretty 
expensive physical hardware if you wanted it all on your desktop. 
Plus equally importantly, its got over 200GB storage that I can 
fill with stuff downloaded at super-quick speeds for pre-processing 
without having to feed it through my slow and 3GB/month limited 
internet connection.

https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/
that link is bound to go dead before long, so:
 http://web.archive.org/web/20211101212745/https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/

But there are two sides to that last point, because slow internet 
also means laggy SSH access. Now learning to turn on SSH 
compression some time ago (part of my Aussies experience actually) 
helps a bit, and as this VPS is also in Australia it's not nearly 
as bad as with my website VPS in the USA, but that little bit of 
lag still gets me. Half the trouble is that I'm very typo-prone at 
the command line, more so the more things are going wrong with 
whatever I'm trying to do, so I'm always trying to move back and 
forwards through the line to edit things. Also, probably due to my 
rural mobile broadband connection, the delay that does happen 
varies all the time so you can't really get used to it. Sometimes 
it just gets stuck and I have a second or two of wondering whether 
the connection has died. Plus there's text editing where it's 
really hard to accept today an experience that's less responsive 
than editing text on a computer from the 1980s.

My solution, which as usual I'm way too lazy to try implementing 
myself, is what I'm calling a "ghost shell". The basic idea is that 
your local PC runs the same shell program as the remote system, but 
this shell program has been modified in order to synchronise all 
aspects of the shell environment. So you can compose a command on 
your computer with all the speed of a local TTY emulation, while at 
the same time the remote system is "catching up" with what you're 
doing, then you only have to wait for the delay when you execute 
the command and wait to see the result.

Additionally for interactively editing text files, the shell 
automatically transfers the file over to your machine and runs it 
in the editor you have installed locally, then transfers it back.

I have realised that all this could be done by setting up a VPN 
between the local computer and the remote server, then using eg. 
NFS to work on files and rexec to launch programs (with a helpful 
script to make the rexec command's environment match that in your 
local shell). But that's complicated to set up and more clunky to 
use. It's probably a more rational approach for me than writing a
"ghost shell" program though. Especially as this is probably one of
those things that seems to me like it should be useful to lots of
other people, but in reality nobody else cares.

 - The Free Thinker, 2021