I work at Gravitational. Sorry this isn't more informative. We are still working on a blog post and release notes with more information. We wanted to get the release out asap because some customers are waiting on it.

This links to a 404 on Github for me

For everybody who has no idea what a "gravitational teleport" is: it's an SSH server (http://gravitational.com/teleport/). Probably it could be included in title? (yeah, I know HN guidelines prefer verbatim titles)

Or at least link to the main page instead of the release notes.

What release notes? I still can't find anything about what makes this release noteworthy.

What does gravitational teleport even mean?

One would think that effect of gravitation could be forced to occur at a different place in the universe, nifty perhaps but not on the top of things I need.

It seems naming has turned into a poetic amalgam of words to excite. Stripped of meaning it is technobabble in its purest form.

It appears that organisation is named Gravitational, and the project name is Teleport.

I don't think there's much basis for this critique aside from the poor title choice.

> Engineers like names to be unambiguous as possible

Such a wealth of evidence that this is complete bullshit.

Emacs, Gnome, Amarok, Chrome, Firefox, Git, Mercurial, Hibernate, Spring, Play, Om, Racer.

I'm still salty about Chrome, "chrome" is a technical term in browser development. It literally means the widgety parts of the GUI that sits on the top, the part that's not the webpage being rendered.

Some places do this on purpose in order to get into existing word-real-estate, and maybe even give the impression that their product is responsible for it.

unambiguous != self-descriptive

I may not understand what Emacs is by looking at just the name, but I'll definitely not think it's a breakthrough in quantum physics or a planetary engineering project.

We're now 5 replies deep into a comment by someone that shows historical & purposeful pedantry.

I would state that, in previous times, this type of comment thread would be killed fairly quickly given what you name something really isn't that important vs. what it actually does for helping secure infrastructure. Perhaps we're seeing the effect of viral irrationality manifest itself here, within our gates.

We're here for learning about technology. We're not here to have some meaningless discussion about marketing tactics.

Yeah, this is true. I should not have commented.

Second thought kills, so I killed second thought. ;)

Isn't Emacs short for elisp Macros?

GNOME is Gnu Network Object Model Environment.

a lot of these things it makes sense just to give a unique name (Git, Mercurial) followed by its 'type', e.g. "The Git VCS".

Editor Macros, I believe. There were several Emacses before GNU Emacs.

A yes, like ycombinator.

that isn't a product though, right?

It's a company, under which other companies are contained?

Gravitational teleport sounds like something out of cheap science-fiction novel. Magical device with pseudo scientific name which inner workings are never explained. It's only purpose is to act as a deus ex machina when author runs out of ideas.

On the other hand, future heralded by sci-fi is indeed now: you can download your gravitational teleport and you are free to use it :)

Related; I wish people would stop picking such names for their products / companies. Nowadays if I read anything about DevOps, I start to feel like I'm reading something about naval fleet command. Or the other day I saw that headline and thought about Mars terraforming project, only it turned out to be a configuration management software. sigh.

Strange you should say that I was going to call my Mars Terraforming project Configuration Manager.

Perhaps by the time we get to the level where we're doing mass geo-engineering, all the cool trademarks and names will be gone :(

That's why such projects will use their vast artificial intellect to name themselves things like "Just Read The Instructions" and "I Thought He Was With You" :)

Unfortunate Conflict Of Evidence is my favourite.

I'm partial to Lightly Seared on the Reality Grill

I wonder who uses this. If you have a fleet, cluster, group or 'multiple' boxes you need to SSH to, doesn't Kerberos make more sense? Or at least something like SSSD's public key proxy? And if you're doing it for configuration management, doesn't actual configuration management make more sense?

this is more than just authentication/authorization. It also servers as a transparent bastion server tier, and allows you to do full historical auditing of interactive sessions, on a highly available setup (if you set it up that way).

You can rig a lot of this functionality up yourself, but there aren't a lot (or any) open source solutions out there that come as relatively complete turn-key packages.

That's not a very informative link. Was hoping to see a changelog or something.

What advantages does Teleport offer over, say, a PAM module? We currently do this, and it works a treat for managing user SSH access.

The one thing I do potentially find useful is the session replay. It could help quite a bit with auditing.

its mainly auditing. There are a bunch of sectors where you are either required to have audit logs of interactive sessions, or you really want to have it anyway.

It's also just a really convenient bastion server setup.

Which PAM module are you using? Or a custom one?

Looks interesting. Has anybody here used this?

I've wanted to try it, but I've not had the time to read over the documentation. What would really help is if they had native repos for debian, ubuntu, etc with this prepackaged.

I tried, but at the time all users had access to all servers in cluster. Which does not work within my organisation. Shame, because it looks really nice.

that is a serious dealbreaker

I've POCd it. I know GitLab is looking to potentially use it internally, but I don't know where they are with the POC process.

is there a changelog anywhere? I'd REALLY like to see it, I've been keeping an eye on Teleport for a while now.