31–40 of 51 posts
I use it to back up a few virtual machines that, in the event of a site loss, would be difficult to rebuild but also critical to getting our developers back to work. I take an LVM snapshot of the VM, then use bdsync to replicate it to our backup server, and from there I replicate it off to backblaze, then destroy the snapshot.
Besides Tridgell's venerable rsync, there exists a permissively licensed implementation[0] by openbsd. 0. https://www.openrsync.org/
When pulling data on MacOS from a Linux computer I would experiment hangs even when setting protocol versions to 29 or 28. What fixed for me was to just switch to the samba rsync program on MacOS.
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In 1996? OpenBSD and Apache had been around for a year. PGP had been around for several years. HTTPS was used where needed. SecurID tokens were common for organizations that cared about security. Admittedly SSH wasn't around, but kerberos+rlogin and SSL+telnet was available. Organizations who cared about security would have SecurID tokens issued to their employees and required for login. Dial-in over phone lines, and…
SSH was around, but not nearly as pervasive it is today. I have memories of having to shake my mouse around during the windows client installation to generate entropy. Fun times
What you're describing is PuttyGen. According to Wikipedia, the first Putty release was in 1999. Archive.org doesn't have any snapshots of the Putty website before 2000, so that checks-out.
The RSA patent didn't expire in the US until September 2000, so that's when free implementations like OpenSSH first became widely available. That's precisely when I started using it...
The original SSH was first released mid-1995. There would have been a small number of installations in 1996, but absolutely negligible. It was not well-known until later, circa 2000.
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In 1996? OpenBSD and Apache had been around for a year. PGP had been around for several years. HTTPS was used where needed. SecurID tokens were common for organizations that cared about security. Admittedly SSH wasn't around, but kerberos+rlogin and SSL+telnet was available. Organizations who cared about security would have SecurID tokens issued to their employees and required for login. Dial-in over phone lines, and…
And every machine had 100 RCEs that you could discover with a few hours of effort.
I can understand how, if your whole world was Windows 3.1 and 95, you'd feel that way about security at the time.
The first time I got paid to use rsync was nearly 25 years ago. It provided for reasonably space-efficient, remote, versioned backups of a mail server, using hard links. That mail server used maildir, which...for those who are not familiar: With maildir, each email message is a separate file on the disk. Thus, there were a lot of folders that had many thousands of files in them. Plus hardlinks for daily/weekly/whatev…
If you ever need to do something like this again, it's often faster to parallelize rsync. One tool that provides this is fpsync:
I've been using this extensively recently. I was setting up remote virtual machines that boot a live ISO containing all the software for the machine. Sometimes I need to change a small config file, which would lead to generating a new 1.7GiB ISO, but 99.9% of that ISO is identical to the previous one. So I used rsync. Blew my mind when after a day of working on these images, uploading 1.7GiB ISO after 1.7GiB ISO, wir…
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to be fair level of security of systems back then was pretty fucking bad
6 characters or fewer passwords, if there were passwords at all. Phreaking still worked into the 90s, and all sorts of really stupid things were done without really thinking about the security at all. They'd print out receipts with the entire credit or debit card number and information on it, or carbon copy the card with an impression, and you'd see these receipts blowing around parking lots, or find entire bags or d…
I've been using this extensively recently. I was setting up remote virtual machines that boot a live ISO containing all the software for the machine. Sometimes I need to change a small config file, which would lead to generating a new 1.7GiB ISO, but 99.9% of that ISO is identical to the previous one. So I used rsync. Blew my mind when after a day of working on these images, uploading 1.7GiB ISO after 1.7GiB ISO, wir…
You'll find something like BorgBackup will be far more efficient than rsync.
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SSH was around, but not nearly as pervasive it is today. I have memories of having to shake my mouse around during the windows client installation to generate entropy. Fun times
I believe your recollection is off by several years... What you're describing is PuttyGen. According to Wikipedia, the first Putty release was in 1999. Archive.org doesn't have any snapshots of the Putty website before 2000, so that checks-out. The RSA patent didn't expire in the US until September 2000, so that's when free implementations like OpenSSH first became widely available. That's precisely when I started us…
On HN there's always a good chance you're talking to some of the people involved in those "negligible" installations. I know that I submitted some patches to Tatu Ylönen for Ssh to compile on Ultrix, so that must have been in 1995 or early 1996 because after that I didn't have access to any Ultrix machines. I may have been an early adopter, but it didn't take long for ssh to take over the world, at least among Unix system administrators; at Usenix within a year everybody was using ssh because there wasn't any alternative and in terms of security it was a life-saver.
As for the RSA patent... I don't know what license the original Ssh was released under, but it was considered "freeware" when it came out and nobody cared about the US RSA patent. Maybe technically in the USA you shouldn't have used it? Nobody cared.
And the mouse-jiggling thing... not specifically a PuttyGen thing. On linux /dev/random device gave you a few bits at a time stingily, only after it had enough entropy, so it was common for programs that needed good randomness to ask you to jiggle the mouse because that was one of the sources of entropy, so bits random bits would come faster. I'm pretty sure that was still the case well into the Zips.
Fun facts, the author of rsync, Andrew Tridgell, is also the one who reverse-engineered Microsoft SMB that laid the foundation for Samba [1]. How he did manage to avoid lawsuits from Microsoft is beyond me. [1] Server Message Block: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Message_Block
>How he did manage to avoid lawsuits from Microsoft is beyond me. MS probably chose not to shut down that effort on the basis that it was enabling the MS stack in Linux. I wish I could dig up an internal presentation that was prepared in the 90s for Bill Gates at the time, which evaluated the threat posed by Linux to Microsoft. I think they were probably happy that Linux now had a reason to talk to Windows machines.