Zeroshell

» see zeroshell.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Zeroshell was born in June 2006, a date we have because its author put it in his own farewell notice. Fulvio Ricciardi built a Linux distribution with a single job: get installed on cheap hardware and be configured entirely through a browser, so the machine became a router and firewall without anybody having to open a config file. It ran on x86 and x86-64, and later on ARM boards including the Raspberry Pi.

Competing router distributions of the era expected you to be comfortable in a shell. Zeroshell expected a browser, and it shipped under the GPL as a free download small enough to sit on a CD or a USB stick.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the captive portal years ~

The feature list explains the spread. One box could load-balance and fail over across several internet connections, including the mix of one ADSL line and three mobile modems its own documentation used as the worked example, and the same box would run a captive portal for a hotspot with RADIUS authentication and accounting behind it, a transparent web proxy with antivirus and URL blacklists, layer 7 firewall rules using nDPI, traffic shaping, VLAN management and a wireless access point with several SSIDs. For a small ISP, a campus, a hotel or an internet cafe, one free download covered the shopping list, and the web interface meant whoever configured it did not have to know Linux.

That last customer is where I recognize this from, at a distance of one job title. The Turkish internet cafe layer of the early 2000s ran on exactly this shape of machine, a gateway in the corner handling authentication and bandwidth sharing for twenty screens of Counter-Strike. Between 2002 and 2005 I was on the paying side of that counter. Zeroshell showed up a little later and from Italy, and it was the sort of thing the owner installed rather than anything the customers ever saw.

~ one maintainer ~

Fifteen years of releases and the credits never grew past one name. The trouble with a single-author network appliance is that the web interface is both the whole point and the entire attack surface, and Zeroshell collected a run of CVEs across its versions, most of them landing on one CGI script called kerbynet. The final release, 3.9.5, shipped on 16 January 2021.

~ the domain he said he would sell ~

The end of life notice went up on the front page that April, five sentences where the news items used to be. "The project has now reached the end of life. Zeroshell was born in June 2006 and has exceeded 200.000 installations in the world. Any security updates will be guaranteed until September 30, 2021. I thank everyone who believed and contributed in various ways to improving the project. The zeroshell.org domain will be decommissioned or sold on September 30, 2021." Underneath it, the feature list and the documentation links stayed exactly where they had always been.

The domain outlived its own deadline by two years. It was still answering in September 2023 and had gone quiet by that December, and today zeroshell.org resolves to a registrar page reading "This domain is already taken." The images are still downloadable from mirrors, which is the normal afterlife for anything GPL, but nobody is minding the kerbynet script now.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »