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

console.dev

31–40 of 343 posts

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

#31
post #13

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…

Linux just isn't plug and play enough yet to make the switch less painful than dealing with the pain-points created by anti-consumer practices by Apple and Microsoft on MacOS and Windows, even for technically literate people.

I made the switch a year ago after having reached my breaking point with Windows and it still was a massive pain and daily loss of performance. For comparison, I also rooted my Android phone and installed LineageOS without google services which crippled it significantly and it still wasn't as much as a pain to do as using Linux on my workstation.

People often say (not talking about you, just something I see on HN often) that it's easy nowadays and anyone can use it but it's not been my experience and I think it's the very attitude that keeps it from being a commonplace OS for the consumer market. I keep a list in a file I call "linux sins" but without having to look at it you can figure out the problem by just googling any benign problem someone might encounter on their OS and checking the answers. Do the answers start with "Click there" or "Open your terminal"? I don't see the situation changing since people who develop for linux generally refuse to acknowledge the problem.

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

#34

Hetzner has a similar product at better pricing that i have been using a minimalist dropbox alternative https://www.hetzner.com/en/storage/storage-box Access via rsync/sftp/scp

Your link is dead for me. Maybe you wanted to link to this? https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box

Hetzner is throttling bandwidth after traffic exceeds ~5x the storage capacity while rsync.net doesn't seem to. Hetzner also only supports a very small number of snapshots in total while rsync.net supports more per day.

I don't think Hetzner and rsync.net are really competing with each other. rsync.net's focus is more on business customers, while Hetzner targets private customers.

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

#35
post #29
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 yo…

Not having data encrypted by default is concerning, however I do admire the simplistic approach of handling your own dataflow and tools for sure.

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

#36

Hetzner has a similar product at better pricing that i have been using a minimalist dropbox alternative https://www.hetzner.com/en/storage/storage-box Access via rsync/sftp/scp

I tried to view the link. Got a site not found error.

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

#37
post #33

I do get the "no separate firewall" reasoning, but I'm paranoid enough that I'd at least want some PF rules just in case some daemon gets started by accident.

Oh I'm pretty sure there is a firewall configured on the nodes themselves (customers get shell access) and he just meant that there isn't a separate firewall box in front of the servers.

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

#38
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…

"How are personal files being handled? Is encryption being used? Are you able to access this data using a shared key?"

We give you an empty UNIX filesystem. So, if you push up files over rsync or sftp, they will sit here unencrypted.

However, there are now excellent "tools like rsync that encrypt the remote result with a key rsync.net never sees" - chief among them being 'borg'[1]. Other options include duplicity and restic - all of which transport over SFTP.

So it's up to you and you have total control. If you want ease of use and you want to browse into your account (or one of your immutable daily snapshots[2]) and grab a file over SFTP you probably don't want to encrypt everything on this end.

On the other hand, if you want a totally secure remote filesystem that is nothing but encrypted gibberish from our standpoint, you should use 'borg'.

"Are you able to access this data using a shared key?"

We are running stock, standard OpenSSH and you can, indeed, use an SSH keypair to authenticate with. In fact, you have a .ssh/authorized_keys file in your account so you can specify IP restrictions and command restrictions as well ...

" ... how will you be able to recover from physical failure if you only appear to be serving from a single location?"

A standard rsync.net account has no replication. We are the backup and your account lives in, and only in, the specific location you choose when you sign up. However, for 1.75x the price (ie., not quite double) we will replicate your account, nightly, to our Fremont, CA location.[3]

"As a sidenote, what keyboard are you using?"

It is a Keytronic E03600U2.

[1] https://www.borgbackup.org/

[2] We create and rotate/maintain snapshots of your entire account that are immutable/readonly - so you have protection against ransomware/mallory.

[3] ... which happens to be the core he.net datacenter - one of the nicest and most operationally secure datacenters I have ever been in.

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

#40
post #32

Hetzner has a similar product at better pricing that i have been using a minimalist dropbox alternative https://www.hetzner.com/en/storage/storage-box Access via rsync/sftp/scp

Also, Borg backup.

rsync.net was the first storage provider to support Borg out of the box and also has a special tier for Borg users (which was later expanded for restic and some others iirc).

I also like that their Europe location is in Switzerland. I think it's useful for a number of reasons to store critical data in more than one jurisdiction.

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