My far-reaching tendrils.

Sometimes I am absolutely amazed by the Internet.

No, I'm not talking about weird porn sites, or gay-christian-bondage-bears-for-voting-rights websites, or stoopid flash animations, or any crap like that. I'm talking about this Open-SSH sftp-chroot howto. In it, this piece of code I wrote years ago is used and recommended as one part of the many layers of chrooting sftp with Open-SSH.

Today, I got an email from someone, thanking me for my work on sftp-chroot, and asking some questions about how to go further with the concept. I was totally confused. I had never documented an sftp-chroot method. I didn't know this guy. But he was quoting my sftpsh code, so I figured I must have corresponded with him or one of his colleagues in the past. So I check my email archives. Nope, never heard of the guy. How the heck did he find ME when talking about sftp chroot? Further email searches for keywords in his email turn up an exchange four years ago where I sent a guy a copy of sftpsh, relating to - you guessed it - sftp-chroot.

So I decided to Google. I gave Google a keyword from his email that sounded too specific to be anything but a direct quote from whatever document he was citing. Sure enough, the first hit was a HOWTO, written by the gentlemen with whom I had corresponded four years prior. His document was terse, with no contact information. The only name/email in the entire HOWTO was mine, in the middle of my sftpsh code. BINGO! That's why the guy confused me as the author. So I wrote him a quick note, and thanked him for the letter, while explaining the confusion that led him to me.

It always amazes me how many trails I've left behind on the internet. Apache code. Perl CGI scripts. Countless mailing list message archives. Random C code written to solve a problem years and years ago. Patches for FOSS coding projects. And add to that all the derivations from my work where me or my work is cited. Rawk. I love the internet. Collaborative creation at its chaotic best.