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Interview with CEO of rsync.net: “no firewalls and no routers”

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Re: Interview with CEO of rsync.net: “no firewalls and no routers”

#21

Post by frammie »

Really well done interview, some real interesting bits in there.

One part concerned me though, in the interview, it mentions "we own (and have built) all of our own platform." and it fails to mention a few critically important key parts of a storage platform, first being encryption. How are personal files being handled? Is encryption being used? Are you able to access this data using a shared key?

As well as contingency, what happens if critically important data is stored on your platform. On your website you mention:

"We have a world class, IPV6-capable network with locations in three US cities as well as Zurich and Hong Kong"

however fails to mention if replication is done across these locations. If technology (drives) is stolen from your datacenter, or mechanical failures beyond your control happen, how will you be able to recover from physical failure if you only appear to be serving from a single location?

Excuse me if I'm wrong but I couldn't find anything concrete in either the interview or your website. The premise of the platform seems quite well aligned with keeping alive the the UNIX philosophy, and reminds me of Tarsnap.

Either way, well made interview and interesting approach to a storage platform.

As a sidenote, what keyboard are you using? It seems really interesting and you failed to mention it in the interview :)

EDIT: It appears that you offer Geo-Redundant Filesystem as as separate product, maybe you would want to make this a bit more visible on your website except for only the FAQ and order pages. Either way, it seems like a sufficient move, that does still leave the topic of encryption though. As mentioned traffic is encrypted using SSH ofcourse, but is the data itself encrypted on your platform?

Re: Interview with CEO of rsync.net: “no firewalls and no routers”

#23

Post by throwaway1777 »

Alupis wrote: post #13
lunixbochs wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're possibly something like a dosdude patcher or modified bootloader to run an OS like Catalina on it.

I have trouble understanding why people go through these hoops. Yeah, I get it, people love their Mac's... but the company that produces them actively undermines your ability to continue using perfectly good hardware past what they feel is "profitable". This leads to huge efforts to hack/reverse the updaters, or alter newer OS versions to trick them into installing, etc. I'd personally jump over to some system that d…

As opposed to how “easy” it is to install Linux this doesn’t seem half bad.

Re: Interview with CEO of rsync.net: “no firewalls and no routers”

#24

Post by antongribok »

Reading this takes me back to when I started playing with storage professionally.

For me it was in 2004, also using 3Ware controllers. I was running on RedHat (before RHEL) and XFS before it was common on Linux, and similarly had memory issues when trying to repair filesystems.

Re: Interview with CEO of rsync.net: “no firewalls and no routers”

#25

Post by _trampeltier »

rsync wrote: post #16
booi wrote: post #12

A simple layer 2 network topology only works in very narrow use cases (like this one). But a "dumb switch" means you also lose a lot of observability and it's very difficult to apply consistent network acls.

Agreed - we are, in a sense, "cheating" because our product is so simple that we do have one of these "very narrow use cases". The benefits are tremendous, however, and go beyond day to day operations. A dumb switch has no credentials to protect and there is almost zero attack surface. Further, if our switch dies we can immediately replace it with any other dumb switch that just happens to be lying around. If you rea…

I work in industrie automation and I can't agree more to dumb devices. There are a lot of nice special products, but if something goes broken, you have first tousend of pages manual, just maybe an identical part. The guy on the night shift has also to know this special part well .. and so on. The dumb devices, you can replace easy without any problems tomorrow or also in 10 .. 20 years.

Re: Interview with CEO of rsync.net: “no firewalls and no routers”

#27

Post by SheinhardtWigCo »

rsync wrote: post #10
Aeolos wrote: post #7

> "I have a early-2009 “octo” Mac Pro [...]" > > OS: macOS Does this make anyone else a bit uncomfortable? I don't think MacOS is still receiving security updates on that hardware. I'm all for using old hardware for as long as it keeps working, but I would never browse the internet with a vulnerable OS on a vulnerable processor (spectre etc...) Or am I missing something?

"Or am I missing something?" Yes, one minor thing ... Although you are correct that Apple is not officially supporting the latest versions of OSX on that hardware, there is a trivially easy hack of the system that will allow you to load newer versions of OSX. So, like many of you, I am not running Catalina but I am running an updated, patched version of OSX.

Neat, does that include System Integrity Protection and Authenticated Root Volume on your hardware?

Re: Interview with CEO of rsync.net: “no firewalls and no routers”

#29

Post by dharmab »

frammie wrote: post #21

Really well done interview, some real interesting bits in there. One part concerned me though, in the interview, it mentions "we own (and have built) all of our own platform." and it fails to mention a few critically important key parts of a storage platform, first being encryption. How are personal files being handled? Is encryption being used? Are you able to access this data using a shared key? As well as continge…

I've used rsync.net in the past- it's essentially "filesystem as a service." You, the customer, use it to back your own software that handles the encryption and replication. Their website has some how-to guides for some common software, or you can roll your own with the rsync protocol.

Notably, their website only claims transfer encryption, not encryption at rest. You can of course encrypt your files yourself with your own keys.

Re: Interview with CEO of rsync.net: “no firewalls and no routers”

#30

Post by rsync »

Alupis wrote: post #13
lunixbochs wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're possibly something like a dosdude patcher or modified bootloader to run an OS like Catalina on it.

I have trouble understanding why people go through these hoops. Yeah, I get it, people love their Mac's... but the company that produces them actively undermines your ability to continue using perfectly good hardware past what they feel is "profitable". This leads to huge efforts to hack/reverse the updaters, or alter newer OS versions to trick them into installing, etc. I'd personally jump over to some system that d…

I agree with this. It's why a hackintosh has never appealed to me.

However, in this case, the tweak I needed to do to the mac pro was so trivial as to be (essentially) cost-free. No need to alter the installer, etc.

It pleases me to be (re)using this machine for over 12 years now - especially given what a triumph of workstation design these mac pros were ...

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