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Diskless infrastructure in beta (System Transparency: stboot) (2022)

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Re: Diskless infrastructure in beta (System Transparency: stboot) (2022)

#21

Post by donio »

crazygringo wrote: post #2

Wow, I had no idea "diskless infrastructure" was even a thing. Easy to imagine in theory, but this is the first time I'm hearing about it in practice, and it makes total sense in this case. It makes me curious if there are any other real-world use cases for diskless. Are there any customers who would benefit from such a configuration from major cloud providers? E.g. a diskless EC2 instance type that ran off of a RAM…

Netbooted machines were not that uncommon in the past. I implemented and ran a large scale nfsroot build farm around 2010. The company was in the business of high end NFS storage so maximum dogfooding was a part of the goal. Prior to that at another company we had most of the infra (including stuff like corporate email and web servers) and also all the engineering user desktops on nfsroot. Seems a bit crazy in a hindsight but it got the company through the startup years and shipping several generations of products.

Re: Diskless infrastructure in beta (System Transparency: stboot) (2022)

#22

Post by traceroute66 »

crazygringo wrote: post #2

Wow, I had no idea "diskless infrastructure" was even a thing. Easy to imagine in theory, but this is the first time I'm hearing about it in practice, and it makes total sense in this case. It makes me curious if there are any other real-world use cases for diskless. Are there any customers who would benefit from such a configuration from major cloud providers? E.g. a diskless EC2 instance type that ran off of a RAM…

> Wow, I had no idea "diskless infrastructure" was even a thing.

OVPN[1] (Swedish jurisdiction) have been diskless[2] since day one, and this has been tested and proven in court[3]:

"To summarize the verdict, the Rights Alliance and their security experts have not been able prove any weaknesses in OVPN's systems that could mean that logs are stored. OVPN therefore wins the information injunction as our statements and evidence regarding our no log VPN policy have not been disproven. The movie companies also need to pay OVPN's legal fees which amounts to 108 000 SEK (roughly $12300 at current exchange rate)."

[1]https://www.ovpn.com [2]https://www.ovpn.com/en/security [3]https://www.ovpn.com/en/blog/ovpn-wins-court-order

Re: Diskless infrastructure in beta (System Transparency: stboot) (2022)

#23

Post by dekhn »

jeffbee wrote: post #20
crazygringo wrote: post #2

Wow, I had no idea "diskless infrastructure" was even a thing. Easy to imagine in theory, but this is the first time I'm hearing about it in practice, and it makes total sense in this case. It makes me curious if there are any other real-world use cases for diskless. Are there any customers who would benefit from such a configuration from major cloud providers? E.g. a diskless EC2 instance type that ran off of a RAM…

GCE has been offering diskless instances since always, even if customers did not realize it. They explicitly describe some instance types as "diskless" these days.

I am unable to find any information on GCE having diskless now. Everything I see when I search is from 2013 (ten years ago) but nothing on the GCE site.

Not clear what 'diskless' means in this situation anyway.

Re: Diskless infrastructure in beta (System Transparency: stboot) (2022)

#24

Post by latchkey »

I created a system that booted 12k+ diskless blades via PXE and running Ubuntu (it was built to scale to 30k+, but we never got there).

This generally works well, but I'd say there are about 0-20 blades that crash a day due to some sort of memory corruption issues.

Due to the fact that I was operating remotely from the hardware, I never really got a chance to resolve it... also... just a simple reboot would fix it (and the blades booted in ~60 seconds, so it wasn't a huge issue).

So, on large enough scale... this can be an issue to consider.

Re: Diskless infrastructure in beta (System Transparency: stboot) (2022)

#26

Post by kfreds »

It's worth noting that System Transparency is a multi-year effort to bring transparency to running computer systems. We are aiming for what we call transparent servers. Just like there's open source software and open source hardware we think there should be open source running systems.

That's the gist of it.

If you think this is interesting I can highly recommend you check out Sigsum - our transparency log design for signed checksums. We've been developing it for a few years and will most likely toggle it version 1 this spring. Here's its threat model:

Sigsum is designed to be secure against a powerful attacker that controls:

- The signer’s secret key and infrastructure - The log’s secret key and infrastructure - A threshold of so-called witnesses that cosign the log

Another project that started at Mullvad VPN and is now its own company is Tillitis. Its first product is an open source hardware USB device with unconditional measured boot and key derivation inspired by DICE. Everything from source code to Verilog and KiCad files are on GitHub. Enjoy!

Cheers, Fredrik Stromberg

(Disclosure: I cofounded Mullvad VPN, invented System Transparency, co-designed Sigsum, co-designed TKey, and cofounded Tillitis)

Re: Diskless infrastructure in beta (System Transparency: stboot) (2022)

#27

Post by jskrablin »

crazygringo wrote: post #2

Wow, I had no idea "diskless infrastructure" was even a thing. Easy to imagine in theory, but this is the first time I'm hearing about it in practice, and it makes total sense in this case. It makes me curious if there are any other real-world use cases for diskless. Are there any customers who would benefit from such a configuration from major cloud providers? E.g. a diskless EC2 instance type that ran off of a RAM…

I was maintaining a few public terminals for Internet access in local hackerspace many moons ago - back when the cheap broadband and wifi at every corner weren't at all common. Terminals were diskless Pentium 100 (or even slower) PCs that PXE booted off the terminal server Xen VM running Xfce via Xvfb. Terminals were basically oversized I/O controllers taking care of keyboard/mouse inputs and driving video output.

Nowadays you could use similar approach to run cluster for in-memory compute tasks or similar. PXE boot identical OS to bunch of servers and have them compute sth. If you need to repurpose them for something else - reboot them into a different PXE boot image. In case of VPN providers the motivation is probably to prevent (permanent) logging of sensitive information.

Re: Diskless infrastructure in beta (System Transparency: stboot) (2022)

#28

Post by kfreds »

morsecodist wrote: post #9

These are great updates. I couldn't be happier with mullvad. The VPN space is saturated with a lot of VPNs constantly advertising with borderline false claims (a VPN won't stop advertisers from targeting you for example) and adding unrelated features (like an anti-virus). But mullvad is off to the side providing a high quality, truly private, VPN service at a great price.

Thanks!

Re: Diskless infrastructure in beta (System Transparency: stboot) (2022)

#29

Post by systems_glitch »

mprovost wrote: post #17
crazygringo wrote: post #2

Wow, I had no idea "diskless infrastructure" was even a thing. Easy to imagine in theory, but this is the first time I'm hearing about it in practice, and it makes total sense in this case. It makes me curious if there are any other real-world use cases for diskless. Are there any customers who would benefit from such a configuration from major cloud providers? E.g. a diskless EC2 instance type that ran off of a RAM…

It used to be pretty common (in the late 1980s) to run Sun workstations without hard disks, all booting off an NFS server. But then disks got cheap... I always set up a boot server hosting a bunch of BSD/Linux images so I could install an OS remotely (to a local disk) without running around with a CD or USB stick.

Early to mid 80s, on Sun stuff! Swap over half-duplex Ethernet sucks though.

Re: Diskless infrastructure in beta (System Transparency: stboot) (2022)

#30

Post by netfortius »

morsecodist wrote: post #9

These are great updates. I couldn't be happier with mullvad. The VPN space is saturated with a lot of VPNs constantly advertising with borderline false claims (a VPN won't stop advertisers from targeting you for example) and adding unrelated features (like an anti-virus). But mullvad is off to the side providing a high quality, truly private, VPN service at a great price.

Absolutely this! Great service, alongside technical solutions, on the part of Mullvad.
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