Hi Craig,

Craig Skinner wrote on Wed, Mar 23, 2016 at 10:07:10AM +0000:
> On 2016-03-22 Tue 22:49 PM |, Bob Beck wrote:

>> A few years back, Ingo moved it to the new mandoc based man.cgi, and
>> now we've actually moved this to a dedicated place - "man.openbsd.org"

> Superb.
> 
> What's next?
> 
> $ ssh [email protected]
> 
> Welcome guest user to OpenBSD's online manual library.
> 
> The only command available is 'man'.
> 
> (For help; type 'man man[ENTER]'.)
> 
> $

Sounds like a bad idea to me.  The man(1) utility spawns less(1),
and less can spawn editors and shells.  So that is hard to secure.

Even if it could be secured, i don't like the idea of handing out
SSH access to an OpenBSD web server to the general public.  A web
server is always a fragile beast, and attack surface ought to be
minimized.

Even if it could the secured and even if there weren't concerns
about expanding attack surface, it doesn't look like it could be
worth the effort.  I don't think there are many people out there
expecting to find public information on the Internet on anonymous
SSH servers rather than on WWW servers, so it's not likely the
service would see much real-world use.

And even if there were a few people who would use it, i don't
quite see how it would be better for them than what we already
have.  I mean, http://man.openbsd.org/ works with text browsers
on text-only terminals.

Yours,
  Ingo

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