An Easy Way to Find Shell Servers Through Freenode

Update 2023 Auguest 04

Someone reading this post in 2023 might wonder what is a shell server and what is it good for?

A shell server, is a server with a Unix-like OS(usually Linux) which provides shell access to its users with ssh. You have an account on the server with which you can learn Unix commands, play around and learn programming. Shell servers usually have a community of their own of programming and Linux(or Unix-like) enthusiasts.

Back then, they were usually providing a webspace, an email account, a shell account and some storage to keep all these. And you could run IRC bots on them. Nowadays, anyone can simply get free and fast hosting for their static website on providers like Github Pages, Gitlab Pages and so on. But back then, such these did not exist or were not widespread.

A good question is that, are shell servers and account still relevant as of 2023?

I am really unsure about this. But if you are on Windows and want to try some Linux or Unix CLI, shell servers can be a good choice to learn without having to download and launch Linux.

Or if you are on Linux, you can try some FreeBSD commands on a FreeBSD shell server.

Other than this website and your favorite search engine, there is another way to find shell servers. Connect to freenode(it’s an IRC network). Then type this command and press enter: /msg alis list *shells It will send you a list of IRC channels their name ending with “shells”, not all of them are IRC channels of shell servers nor all of them are free(as in price).

Edit: Nowadays as of 2021 you might want to check LiberaChat, too.

Edit2: I forgot to mention tildeverse which lists many tildes, or shell servers. Note that some of these come with non-Linux Unix-likes like BSDs! (As of time of writing this, of course)