Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mullvad: Diskless infrastructure using stboot in beta

mullvad.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 135 posts

Re: Mullvad: Diskless infrastructure using stboot in beta

#71

Post by encryptluks2 »

throwaway984393 wrote: post #52

It's a trade-off. If you have no disk, the disk can't fail, but the network can, and the remote PXE server can, and the remote SAN can. You can get into a state where you have to pray no servers reboot. Intermittent errors can be real annoying when it makes provisioning fail. (used to work a server farm that'd do server rebuilds over PXE, and ran a few diskless cluster projects) An alternative is you use a RAID array…

A network or PXE server can fail regardless, so this are things that always have to be taken into consideration and in those instances then you address those issues. With this type of setup you do not need a remote SAN as it would defeat the purpose of not having external storage that could store logs. Mullvad has servers all over the world, so a temporary failure in one location will not bring down their entire infrastructure.

Re: Mullvad: Diskless infrastructure using stboot in beta

#72

Post by thebean11 »

akerl_ wrote: post #67
Chris2048 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A server in Sweden cannot easily be raided by the Swedish, is the first reason. The second reason is "Swedish laws apply to people in Sweden" seem to make assumptions about what the government can force people to do, or specifically, punish people for not doing. In many cases, authorities just threaten/raid the data-centers so never have to bother take that route. Lastly, I'm not sure this is true: "Swedish laws appl…

This isn’t really responsive to what I’m saying or what you asked me. I didn’t make any assumptions about what Swedish law can or cannot do. Swedish laws apply to people in Sweden. If Swedish law says that you can’t use Helvetica font on your website, and the punishment is 10 years of hand-tracing a better font on stone tablets, then they’re able to apply that law to a Sweden-based web developer, regardless of whethe…

Laws that apply to companies follow different rules than laws that apply to individuals, it feels like you’re conflating the two..

Just because employees reside in Sweden doesn’t mean the company resides in Sweden, legally.

Re: Mullvad: Diskless infrastructure using stboot in beta

#73

Post by eli »

Chris2048 wrote: post #58
akerl_ wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’re overthinking this. The people who run the company are based in Sweden. So they registered the company in Sweden, because that’s where they are. Then they hosted the servers in Sweden, because that’s where they are and where the company is registered. Registering the company somewhere else wouldn’t do them any good when they’re living in Sweden, because the legal system isn’t fooled by sleight of hand l…

You are allowed to start companies in other countries, and thereby avoid local laws, without moving i.e. changing you country of residence. If you believe any different, please say why so. Just "wouldn’t do them any good" is pretty meaningless.

Your theory is an American could start a company that violates US laws so long as they form the entity somewhere else?

Re: Mullvad: Diskless infrastructure using stboot in beta

#74

Post by encryptluks2 »

joker197cinque wrote: post #25

The server configuration (and therefore customers account numbers) is stored in Server OS images I suppose, right ? It shouldn't be an issue as far as inspection is concerned, should it ? Also, isn't there a law that enforces logs to be kept for n years ? How is it compatible with diskless setup ?

No, they would not need to be stored in the images. They are deployed as part of provisioning package according to the post. If they were part of the OS image, they would have to update the image anytime a new customer is added, which would be far less optimal than having Ansible or whatever push changes. There is no law in Sweden that requires logs, and the point of a VPN provider is to not store logs. If your VPN provider is keeping logs of your connections then you should look for a new provider.

Re: Mullvad: Diskless infrastructure using stboot in beta

#75

Post by dboreham »

Chris2048 wrote: post #58
akerl_ wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’re overthinking this. The people who run the company are based in Sweden. So they registered the company in Sweden, because that’s where they are. Then they hosted the servers in Sweden, because that’s where they are and where the company is registered. Registering the company somewhere else wouldn’t do them any good when they’re living in Sweden, because the legal system isn’t fooled by sleight of hand l…

You are allowed to start companies in other countries, and thereby avoid local laws, without moving i.e. changing you country of residence. If you believe any different, please say why so. Just "wouldn’t do them any good" is pretty meaningless.

Completely false.

Re: Mullvad: Diskless infrastructure using stboot in beta

#76

Post by [deleted] »

eli wrote: post #73
Chris2048 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are allowed to start companies in other countries, and thereby avoid local laws, without moving i.e. changing you country of residence. If you believe any different, please say why so. Just "wouldn’t do them any good" is pretty meaningless.

Your theory is an American could start a company that violates US laws so long as they form the entity somewhere else?

[deleted]

Re: Mullvad: Diskless infrastructure using stboot in beta

#77

Post by hipitihop »

dtx1 wrote: post #44
jack_pp wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried youtube music (via youtube premium)? I'm not sure about the high quality audio part because I only listen via bluetooth. The recommendations, general app UX and the fact that I can listen via website on desktop have made me cancel spotify.

For low quality audio it's fine, though there's a lot of music I like missing that spotify has. Quality wise it's all over the place and at best as good as spotify. Generally I don't care much about the UI of any of the services offered and being browser based doesn't really make it any better for me. I can do that with spotify and most other services as well. What I would like to have is a simple paid service with h…

Have you looked at https://roonlabs.com/ ? I'd be interested in your opinion if you have

Re: Mullvad: Diskless infrastructure using stboot in beta

#78

Post by [deleted] »

eli wrote: post #73
Chris2048 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are allowed to start companies in other countries, and thereby avoid local laws, without moving i.e. changing you country of residence. If you believe any different, please say why so. Just "wouldn’t do them any good" is pretty meaningless.

Your theory is an American could start a company that violates US laws so long as they form the entity somewhere else?

[deleted]

Re: Mullvad: Diskless infrastructure using stboot in beta

#79

Post by ComputerGuru »

suyjuris wrote: post #21
yamrzou wrote: post #16

A bit tangential to the main post, but I'd to share a recent positive experience with Mullvad: I am a regular user of Mullvad and recently wanted to try a different VPN, that only provides Wireguard configs (i.e. no native app). I used the default setup. For some reason, my internet connection was flaky, and when it disconnected and reconnected, my traffic leaked. That never happened to me with Mullvad as the app com…

On linux you can create a network namespace exposing only the wireguard network device, so that applications in that namespace cannot leak traffic. Setting this up, however, is quite fiddly in my experience.

It’s easier and more secure to just create a VM that’s bridged to the VPN interface (regardless of protocol) if you don’t use the VPN for everything but the things you do use it for absolutely must go through it.

Re: Mullvad: Diskless infrastructure using stboot in beta

#80

Post by gzer0 »

This is awesome, glad that Mullvad is heading in this direction.

For reference, ExpressVPN (which has been audited by PwC) introduced this in 2019 [1].

Unfortunately, ever since ExpressVPN was purchased by Kape Technologies (they also own PIA, Cyberghost, Zenmate all of which do not have reliable histories); Mulvad has been the clear choice for a while now. They're also the backend for Mozilla VPN (mozilla just whitelabels from Mulvad [3])

  [1] https://www.expressvpn.com/blog/introducing-trustedserver/
  [2] https://www.expressvpn.com/blog/pwc-audits-expressvpn-servers-to-confirm-essential-privacy-protections/
  [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26646510
Post reply on HN