[cellularmitosis]

I just recently signed up for a European VPS which is known for having the cheapest storage, and thought it was peculiar that the root password they sent me contained only alpha and digit characters, no punctuation or symbols of any kind.

When I then had to use their web-based console to do some administration, I quickly discovered I couldn’t type a “.”, then discovered that many other symbols also didn’t seem to work at this console.

Based on the password, it appears their solution is to simply work around the problem rather than fix it :(((((. Pretty shocking state of affairs for 2023.

[owl57]

Sad, but why shocking?

Imagine you're the backend guy tasked with generating the passwords for new users. You see the problem. Now, technically fixing it involves figuring out which other things users will now be able to screw up with dots. More importantly, socially it could involve anything from making a teammate work on this to making an external vendor fork the overengineered HyperReact framework they are using. While this happens, you will be reporting to your manager that sign up isn't ready and you don't have a clue when they can launch the product.

Or you can remove a few characters from PASSWORD_CHARS, maybe increase the password length a bit to compensate, and call it a day.

[cellularmitosis]

You understand that this console doesn’t allow you to “cd ..” (or, more importantly, “cd .ssh”)? I’m saying that this is totally unacceptable and should never have shipped in the first place. There are plenty of other providers who have similar consoles which do not have this problem, so clearly a solution is available. The question is, how are they competent enough to run an VPS warehouse yet not competent enough to install a working console?

[owl57]

Ah, that kind of console! WTF indeed. I was thinking of an administration UI with lots of text fields, like "AWS Management Console" (but that would be probably broken as well if you can't enter a domain name).