ninthfloor.org: access for all

2012 FUNDRAISING CAMPAIGN:

Click here to lend your support to: ninthfloor.org fundraising effort for 2012 and make a donation at www.pledgie.com !

Joining the ninth floor

At the moment we're not accepting new account requests. We'll be back soon, please be patient.

Anybody who has read, understood and accepted the policy can request an account at ninthfloor.org. By asking for an account you state that you agree and accept our policy. We trust you to follow it; be responsible!

There is no registration form, you are invited to write a plaintext email addressed to root@ninthfloor.org and ask for an account. In the email you're kindly asked to shortly introduce yourself, providing at least the following information:

Your full name and location;
Your desired login name;
Optional: a secure means of communication (see below).

You will emailed back shortly, but remember that this is done by hand, so please be patient. The response won't come in minutes.

This manual approach may appear unnecessarily time-consuming, and you may think that an automated form would be more effective. That's right, but we desire to create a community rather than just a set of users. We think that having "human contact" (the email) helps this, and helps users to be responsible by reminding them that behind the service there are real people that are giving you some of their time.

As a final note, if you plan to use the service for IRC, you're kindly asked to join the #ninthfloor channel on the freenode network. There you'll find other friendly users and the server administrators.

When you log in please check the SSH fingerprint! This has to be:

30:e3:63:3f:1c:62:0c:15:23:62:64:3e:71:82:21:93

Providing a secure means of communication

There are two ways to give you the shell access credentials. The easy one is: you provide us your GPG/PGP public key; we'll send you a randomly generated password you are asked to change as soon as you log in.

The other way is with an SSH certificate. You can generate it with the ssh-keygen command:

$ ssh-keygen -t rsa
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/home/you/.ssh/id_rsa):
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase): secure passphrase here
Enter same passphrase again: secure passphrase here
Your identification has been saved in /home/you/.ssh/id_rsa.
Your public key has been saved in /home/you/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.

The file we need is your public key (id_rsa.pub in the example). Once that file is in its place, you'll be able to login as usual (ssh you@ninthfloor.org); once you're logged in, change your account's password. At this point, if you wish, you can remove your ssh public key, located in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys, and use the standard password authentication only.

Forgotten passwords

Unless you ask us not to do so, we'll keep your GPG/PGP key or your ssh public key. By doing so, we'll be able to securely regain access to your account in case you forgot your password.