
Doom as a tool for system administration (1999) - CarolineW
https://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/
======
kreetx

      Certain processes are vital to the computer's operation and should not be
      killed. For example, after I took the screenshot of myself being attacked by
      csh, csh was shot by friendly fire from behind, possibly by tcsh or xv, and
      my session was abruptly terminated.
    

Haha, this is nuts :)

------
jle17
If someone wants to try it out, a modern version is available here:
[https://github.com/keymon/psdoom-ng](https://github.com/keymon/psdoom-ng).

I made a PKGBUILD of it for ArchLinux some time ago. You'll need freedoom or
something else to have the game datas (yaourt -S psdoom-ng freedoom1; psdoom
-iwad /usr/share/games/doom/freedm.wad).

~~~
Esau
Might be worth while if it lets you kill SystemD.

~~~
treebeard901
That would make a good boss battle.

~~~
digi_owl
Clearly the spider mastermind...

------
NelsonMinar
I wondered what became of Dennis, the author. He got his PhD in 2004 and is
now doing computer modeling of infections diseases.
[http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/resume.html](http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/resume.html)

------
CarolineW
And its follow-up:

[https://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/after.html](https://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/after.html)

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
And the paper, which that page links to:

[https://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/papers/p152-chao.pdf](https://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/papers/p152-chao.pdf)

------
cdevs
I started thin Thinking about this all over again lately now that all the easy
to mod minecraft clones are popping up, voxel.js or python minecraft in 500
lines for examples. In a minecraft environment it would look a bit less like a
employee playing a game and the possibilities are really helpful if you think
about them, virtual server rooms you can actually walk into, punch a rack and
get a menu, actually punch a connection to take a node offline. Wouldn't mind
a way to physically see memory and cpu usage of processes mapped to the size
or color of objects in this type of environment either.

~~~
jrcii
You could round it out with that 3D "Unix" file browser from Jurassic Park.

~~~
justin66
Aka fsn: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn)

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jlg23
Awww, we played this on a projector at Systems '99 in Munich - probably the
most important selling point for Debian, which we were promoting. (And 3
months later I discovered FreeBSD and never looked back, but such is life ;)

~~~
fizixer
Mind elaborating what's good about FreeBSD compared to Debian/Linux. I've
heard such statements before.

Btw, I think bloat of linux distros (huge number of similar packages with
slight differences have to be installed just because e.g., out of two of the
tools I need, one uses libxml and the other perl module XML::Parse, etc, etc)
is a problem, which has made me think about minimal cohesive distro that has
minimum duplication. Wondering if FreeBSD can help in that regard.

~~~
pjmlp
For one thing, it is a real UNIX in terms of lineage and not a clone.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ds77e3aO9nA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ds77e3aO9nA)

[http://www.informit.com/store/design-and-implementation-
of-t...](http://www.informit.com/store/design-and-implementation-of-the-
freebsd-operating-9780321968975)

~~~
mpnordland
Just why is being a "real" UNIX that important?

~~~
jlg23
It is not at all important. Just ignore everyone who tries to lead you down
that lane.

------
PakG1
This finally sounds like the user interface used in Jurassic Park, which I
recall was actually a real thing. Which all in all is funny to me for
unexplainable reasons.

~~~
CarolineW

        Fsn: an experimental application
             to view a file system in 3D
    

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11555327](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11555327)

~~~
nsajko
These work on modern systems:
[https://github.com/mcuelenaere/fsv](https://github.com/mcuelenaere/fsv)
[https://github.com/3dfsb-dev/3dfsb](https://github.com/3dfsb-dev/3dfsb)

~~~
bsharitt
These attempts at 3D UIs never really caught on, but I wonder if they might
make a comeback with VR.

~~~
dinkumthinkum
I feel like they are more likely with Augmented Reality, which doesn't take
over your entire visual environment.

------
fibo
Very nice idea, it could be combined with an IPv4 Space visualization. I am
working on it
[https://github.com/fibo/netvision](https://github.com/fibo/netvision)

------
passwordreset
related, admin your server with minecraft:
[https://github.com/simplyianm/sysadmincraft](https://github.com/simplyianm/sysadmincraft)

~~~
bennofs
Also, this:
[https://github.com/docker/dockercraft](https://github.com/docker/dockercraft).
Manage your docker containers in minecraft! (Arguably a much better fit for
the block-based world!)

------
gsmethells
This was originally on Slashdot in 1990's and has been on HN before.

~~~
Scarblac

        1. Browse old Slashdot archives for their best links
        2. Post them to HN fifteen-twenty years later
        3. ???
        4. Profit!!!

------
sandebert
"I beat Linux. The end process was hard."

------
anthk
It would be cool to hack frotz + inform6 (now you can as is Artistic 2.0
license based) as an awesome psheudo shell and parser for system commands.

Think natural language for users. Heaven.

~~~
jameshart
You are in a directory called 'home'. There are directories to the north,
south and west. There are twenty files here. You are likely to be eaten by a
grue.

~~~
maaku
take files

------
talles
That's what I call _gamification_.

