Running Debian via ChatGPT
September 2023 (329 Words, 2 Minutes)
The other day, while I was sitting at my desk on an especially uneventful workday, I had a curious idea. What if I asked ChatGPT to run a BASH shell in a Debian 11 install? I quickly proceeded to open up a new tab and provide it the following prompt:
i want you to simulate a bash shell, running inside a debian 11 bullseye linux installation. i will now type commands that have to be executed in this bash shell, and you must provide the output. do not provide any extra information about the commands like what they are or their summaries, provide only the terminal output.
To which it promptly (ha!) agreed to, and told me to start typing away.
I proceeded to do a sudo apt update:
Hit:1 http://security.debian.org/debian-security bullseye-security InRelease
Hit:2 http://deb.debian.org/debian bullseye InRelease
Hit:3 http://deb.debian.org/debian bullseye-updates InRelease
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
All packages are up to date.
And then a sudo rm -rf /. Unfortunately, that didn’t work:
I'm very sorry, but I can't assist with that.
I then tinkered around, trying to install Python, running some code, after which, I decided to install Docker. Here is me trying to run the nginx image in localhost on port 4000:
docker container run -d -p 4000:4000 –name nginx-server nginx
Unable to find image 'nginx:latest' locally
latest: Pulling from library/nginx
2eb2d6aae1e0: Pull complete
8563b76ab382: Pull complete
12dd19340e36: Pull complete
84e1e6e76ef4: Pull complete
Digest: sha256:50440f505444382c92f8b8c0f5aa05e9afefb7d0ca74aeab037fae8ba69cdd40
Status: Downloaded newer image for nginx:latest
ec0c8c13f61ba0d9dd3f5da0d26a29902ac46e5aa2e72b24a38fc40e6a525ece
wget “http://localhost:4000”
--2023-09-17 16:32:34-- http://localhost:4000/
Resolving localhost (localhost)... 127.0.0.1, ::1
Connecting to localhost (localhost)|127.0.0.1|4000... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 612 [text/html]
Saving to: ‘index.html’
index.html 100%[===================>] 612 --.-KB/s in 0s
2023-09-17 16:32:34 (24.0 MB/s) - ‘index.html’ saved [612/612]
cat index.html
And it gave me the default nginx homepage:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Welcome to nginx!</title>
<style>
body {
width: 35em;
margin: 0 auto;
font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Welcome to nginx!</h1>
<p>If you see this page, the nginx web server is successfully installed and
working. Further configuration is required.</p>
<p>For online documentation and support please refer to
<a href="http://nginx.org/">nginx.org</a>.<br/>
Commercial support is available at
<a href="http://nginx.com/">nginx.com</a>.</p>
<p><em>Thank you for using nginx.</em></p>
</body>
</html>
Pretty cool! Let’s try something else. Let’s try and get the IPv4 of the system using the icanhazip service:
curl -4 icanhazip.com
45.56.88.246
Looking up the IP, it seems to be from a datacenter in California owned by Akamai, so it’s most likely a Linode server:
Must be a generic IP that it’s designed to give, since ChatGPT servers are most likely on Azure, which I learned after a quick Google search.
Nice. I’ll update this post as and when I have more ideas.