Please note that account registration at the Zaibatsu is currently closed. Gopherspace and shell accounts in circumlunar space may be available from the Mare Serenitatis Circumlunar Corporate Republic at republic.circumlunar.space and/or the The Mare Crisium Soviet Socialist Regency at soviet.circumlunar.space. The Republic and Soviet are independently administered servers, interconnected with the Zaibatsu via email, an IRC network and a federated BBS. Get an account at one of these other servers and you will be part of the same user community as if you had an account at the Zaibatsu.
The instructions below are preserved for historical interest and in case account registration is opened again in future.
To request asylum at the Zaibatsu, you need to generate an ssh keypair to use for sftp access.
On Unix-based operating systems such as Linux, *BSD or OS X, this can be performed from the command line by running the command ssh-keygen(1). Please read the man page for further details.
By default, this will create two files:
(if you already have another keypair with these names, you may have specified different names, e.g. id_zaibatsu and id_zaibatsu.pub.
In order for an account to be set up at zaibatsu.circumlunar.space, you need to provide three things:
You can email these things to solderpunk@posteo.net. Do NOT send Solderpunk your PRIVATE key file or you will have to delete both key files and start the process over.
You will be notified via email when your account is ready (this will usually happen within 72 hours, but this is not a guarantee). Once the account is ready, you can access your hosting space with the sftp(1) command, as follows:
sftp -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa username@zaibatsu.circumlunar.space
Replace "username" with your username, and if you specified a different filename to ssh-keygen then use that instead of id_rsa.
To make your life a little easier, you can put some of these details into your ~/.ssh/config file (see the ssh_config manpage for details). The relevant section might look like this:
Host zaibatsu
Hostname zaibatsu.circumlunar.space
User your_username
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_your_key_file
With this in place, you can connect with just:
sftp zaibatsu
Once connected, you will be in your home directory. However, if you ask sftp to run the "pwd" command, it will tell you you are at "/". This is because you have been chrooted into your home directory as a security measure.
If you use "ls", you should find the following in your home directory by default.
The first is a directory called "gopher", or a directory called "gemini", or perhaps both. This is your public gopherspace, or your public Gemini scapsule, accordingly. There are many like it, but this one is *yours*.
The second is a text file called "orientation". Download this to your disk drive by running:
sftp> get orientation
Then use your preferred software to read it. The orientation guide will explain in detail everything you need to know about using the Zaibatsu server, and give you a brief introduction to setting up a gopherhole or Gemini capsule. Contact solderpunk if you require further assistance.