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Dropbox traffic infrastructure: Edge network

blogs.dropbox.com

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Re: Dropbox traffic infrastructure: Edge network

#61

Post by gsich »

acdha wrote: post #47
wongarsu wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know the comment is today taken as the high of HN negativity, but to me the comment seems very reasonable. - Back then there were FTP clients that automatically kept server and client in sync, which is the main feature of Dropbox. Dropbox adds a website, but Windows Explorer already supports FTP nativly. Of course easily creating shared links turned out to be a major thing, but I don't think we can blame people for…

I was just thinking that having used various FTP/SFTP-as-a-filesystem, not to mention NFS and SMB, over a decade or so before Dropbox arrived made the sales pitch immediately obvious: do you want everything to be slow and unreliable, with frequent jank even on fast networks, or not?

Well, SMB worked a decade ago and still does. Main difference is that it works better on local networks.

Re: Dropbox traffic infrastructure: Edge network

#62

Post by hamandcheese »

fireattack wrote: post #53
dpcx wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's possible that you can't clone from the https endpoint but you can from the git endpoint, which helps them (and you) debug the cause.

Yeah, but then the last step is to "copy & paste the results" to .. https://github.com/contact

Yes, presumably being unable to clone is an important data point.

Re: Dropbox traffic infrastructure: Edge network

#63

Post by [deleted] »

sciurus wrote: post #51
meritt wrote: post #7

I wonder which definition of "Edge" is going to win out because right now it's being used interchangeably to mean either: 1) CDN or 2) On-premise machines/IoT.

This article is about neither of those things, though. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_device is the term that's relevant to this article. It's about the network edge itself.

[deleted]

Re: Dropbox traffic infrastructure: Edge network

#64

Post by patrickg_zill »

nodesocket wrote: post #18

> DNS TTL is a lie. Even though we have TTL of one minute for www.dropbox.com, it still takes 15 minutes to drain 90% of traffic, and it may take a full hour to drain 95% of traffic. Interesting, awhile back both Google and AWS engineers replied to a HN thread[1] saying TTL of 30 seconds or so works pretty responsibly and can be trusted and used. Seems to be some disagreement on this. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com…

There's a lot of caching done by e.g. Comcast that does not always honor the TTL.

Re: Dropbox traffic infrastructure: Edge network

#65

Post by scurvy »

sitepodmatt wrote: post #59
scurvy wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MSN Hotmail and Messenger used torrents to distribute binaries in 2006. It's not new nor novel. And I'm sure someone did it before they did.

What binaries did MSN Hotmail have? It was the earlier web mail incarnation of outlook.com?

The Hotmail front-end ran as an ISAPI filter inside IIS.

Messenger had lots of standalone binaries for different functions: CS, SB, DP, etc.

BitTorrent is used in Dropbox, Twitter, MSN, etc to distribute binaries throughout the server platform, not to end users.

Re: Dropbox traffic infrastructure: Edge network

#66

Post by blub »

meteor333 wrote: post #5

I'm surprised there is no mention of security or privacy. I'd have thought that's one of the reasons for controlling your own edge network.

Dropbox doesn't offer privacy. Anything done on the service is visible to them and whoever else convinces them to hand over the data.

They're exactly the type of cloud service that shouldn't be used by businesses or privacy-conscious individuals.

Security's also questionable. They had an incident where one could log into any account a long time ago. More recently they were presenting a fake admin dialog to syphon the admin password on macOS and perform some admin tasks on the machine.

Re: Dropbox traffic infrastructure: Edge network

#67

Post by fireattack »

hamandcheese wrote: post #62
fireattack wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but then the last step is to "copy & paste the results" to .. https://github.com/contact

Yes, presumably being unable to clone is an important data point.

My point is chances are you can't visit https://github.com/contact to paste your debugging result, if you're "Having trouble connecting to github.com".

Re: Dropbox traffic infrastructure: Edge network

#70

Post by mongol »

phoenix24 wrote: post #68
simonw wrote: post #22

TIL about https://github-debug.com/ and https://www.fastly-debug.com/ and https://dropbox-debug.com/ - neat pattern.

pretty cool. quick question, why not just make - https://github.debug or - https://debug.github.com

Why would that be better?
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