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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”

#311

Post by bombcar »

rsync wrote: post #143
tiffanyh wrote: post #120

@rsync If you had to do it all over again, what would you do different (if anything)? E.g. product/positioning/tech-stack/employees/business-decisions

That's a really good question ... In terms of product / tech-stack I don't think I would change anything. In terms of marketing and word of mouth I think we should have given away hundreds of free accounts in the early years (2006-2010) rather than trying to chase them down as paying customers. I believe we had a lot of decent word of mouth but I don't think I appreciated the power of influencers and their ability to…

I think giving away free accounts as a targeted marketing campaign (think - free accounts for the ZFS developers) can be worthwhile - but trying to have a free plan whilst offering the level of support that makes it worth paying for can end up being an exercise in futility.

Even though I love free plans I think it’s better for small startups to grow organically with “cheap and easy to cancel” instead. Or offer credits for new users.

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

#312

Post by bombcar »

yellowapple wrote: post #108
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…

> How are personal files being handled? Is encryption being used? Are you able to access this data using a shared key? Personally, I feel like if you're going to encrypt your data, you should be encrypting it on your end, before sending it to some backup provider who may or may not be keeping your data secure.

You can do zfs send to rsync.net and I believe that allows you to zfs send an encrypted dataset without sending any keys. But I’ve not checked.

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

#313

Post by bombcar »

rsync wrote: post #165
RaitoBezarius wrote: post #142

You write down that you have no router, though your primary US location is connected to a "quintuple-homed network" and all global locations are at least triple-homed. What does that mean exactly? Is your IP provider quintuple-homed? Or are you running a bit more complicated setup than you explain but the gist is that you have no particular routing mechanisms? What does that say regarding your high availability? If o…

The primary US location, in San Diego[1], gives us a managed, blended bandwidth product which is, in fact, quintuple homed and has been since we moved in (2001). So we have a dumb switch in our rack, but they have routers. In 2021 that's a weird bandwidth product and a weird setup but in 2001 it was "normal" and we just stay with that setup out of inertia (and the fact that we can't connect to he.net in San Diego). A…

Good old Castle Access - and they really seem to take the “Castle” part pretty seriously.

We were there at a similar time - I probably saw the rsync.net servers.

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

#314

Post by bombcar »

audience_mem wrote: post #170
lokl wrote: post #164

I wish I had a personal use case where the pricing of rsync.net made sense. It looks like a great service. For now, I use Backblaze Unlimited. I realize they are not the same service, but Backblaze works for my personal stuff and the price is great.

> Backblaze Test your backups. https://messengergeek.wordpress.com/2018/03/09/backblaze-rev...

People think of backblaze as a backup/archive but it is explicitly not an archive - it is a backup and if you delete a file on your system it is purged within 30 days from the copy.

Most people don’t really think about this and expect that any backup is AlSO an archive. You can get burned by this and have to use b2 or whatever it is instead.

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

#315

Post by bombcar »

shydwoo wrote: post #268

Why would i buy 1TB for $20 per month here instead of getting 6TB for $8/month from Microsoft?

The limitations on OneDrive are considerable as it’s built on top of Sharepoint somehow.

But rsync.net is a backup product and OneDrive is a large file sharing drive.

Attempt to use that 6TB in backup situations and you may experience issues.

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

#316

Post by tinus_hn »

tjalfi wrote: post #243
function_seven wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know... I mean, maybe the security posture is to annoy the hackers into giving up? ("This thing requires a Java applet and is slow as hell. Screw it, let's just pwn the bank across the street") I'll call it Security by Inconvenience.

That reminds me of a post[0] on alt.sysadmin.recovery. The hackers were annoyed by the compromised machine so they installed security updates and did other system administration tasks. [0] https://groups.google.com/g/alt.sysadmin.recovery/c/ITd7OlMr...

Amusing but today there’s two kinds of hackers: people who manually run a campaign like in your story and the endless hordes of bots that automatically exploit systems to turn them into botnet slaves or cryptolocker hostages.

You can’t inconvenience a bot.

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

#317

Post by driverdan »

travisgriggs wrote: post #245

> I start the day with a short walk outdoors. I don’t want the first thing my eyes see to be print, and I don’t want the first thing my body does to be sitting. So I walk a bit. I like that. I like that a lot. That's a very enviable practice. I think I know what I'll be experimenting with this next week. Did not expect to read that article and have the most stand out thing be a routine change I'd want to copy. You ne…

Get a dog and you won't have an excuse for skipping a morning walk.

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

#318

Post by driverdan »

Crontab wrote: post #139

John's usage reminded me of something I read in Rob Rike's "Uses This" interview[1]: "I want no local storage anywhere near me other than maybe caches. No disks, no state, my world entirely in the network. Storage needs to be backed up and maintained, which should be someone else's problem, one I'm happy to pay to have them solve." [1] https://usesthis.com/interviews/rob.pike/

The main downside of this is if you lose internet access you lose access to most of your data. I intentionally have a local NAS so that I don't have to worry about outages.

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

#319

Post by zarkov99 »

tecleandor wrote: post #307
zarkov99 wrote: post #246

For people who use rsync.net, is this something that can replace Dropbox for multi-machine synching? For all its flaws, Dropbox does allows me a semi-seamless transition between my laptop and my workstation.

I think Syncthing could be better for those purposes. I use that for synching my homes (config files and essential work files, keys and so on) between my desktop and laptop. I have a copy running in my NAS to always have a copy available, one in my laptop, one in my desktop, and I was thinking about having one in my phone to run only when I'm charging (so I don't kill my battery).

Can you compare Synching and Dropbox? I have been a (paying) Dropbox user for many years but the product is not that good, especially on Linux. I would love a more reliable alternative.

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

#320

Post by unionpivo »

hayst4ck wrote: post #176
korethr wrote: post #48

I wonder if they have any sales to large enterprises or similar institutions. In my experience, the larger organizations will have a "security" questionnaire required of their vendors, and the person administering it is a droid, incapable of evaluating whether the questions, originally written in the mid-00s and only updated for buzzword compliance since, are applicable to modern security practice today, or to the pa…

On one hand, a firewall that accepts incoming port 22 connections isn't that different from only having port 22 listening. On the other hand, a firewall is an explicit declaration of the ports you want open and who you want them open to, which seems like, at the very least, a useful thing to do. If nothing else it seems like defense in depth. I'm not sure I buy that a system designed around "default deny" is an incre…

they just don't have dedicated firewall. That doesn't mean they can't run ipfilter or whatever, on the hosts themselves with default deny.

In fact he mentioned port knocking. You pretty much need some kind of host firewall for that.

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