Comment by binwiederhier | Hacker News Reader

Comment by binwiederhier | Hacker News Reader

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First of all, I love your username. Are you affiliated with the rsync tool or just an rsync lover like me? If you are, I bow my head to you and thank you. :-D

If you are happy with SMS and twilio, then use it. Having many options is generally always awesome.

The main reason I made ntfy was because I mumbo jumbo (that's a technically term) on all sorts of servers for work and for fun, and I often do things in a tmux or screen that take forever, like rsync something (ha!) or reseed a MySQL replica. On many of those servers, I cannot or should not install anything, and I certainly don't want to leave an auth token in the bash history.

For those use cases, having a short command to ping me when something is done is FREAKING AWESOME. This has become muscle memory to me by now:

   rsync -av bla root@myserver:/bla; curl -d "rsync done" ntfy.sh/philalerts

No auth token. No looong string of things. Just a simple curl.

But again. If you're happy with SMS+twilio, then there's no reason to switch. Though I would love it if you could give it a shot.

"First of all, I love your username. Are you affiliated with the rsync tool or just an rsync lover like me?"

I am merely an rsync lover like you.

In 2005 I named my company rsync.net because I thought it was descriptive of the service.

Prior to naming it that, I explicitly asked permission from both the original author of 'rsync' and the maintainers at the time. They said they had no problem with it.

I have not authored any piece of the rsync tool.

Just yesterday was checkout out rsync.net Anyways, notifications means no cost. I can run this server along with my existing vps. Twilio is quickly pricy in some countries. Also unencrypted if you want to keep your alerts private. Top of my head these are things I can think of.

Will you be flooded with spam messages now that you have published the magic URL?

Some twisted soul could even put sending a message to you via cronrab every minute, and you don't seem to have any way to block it, or filter it from the rest.

I'd say that it's infinitely better to have an opaque an otherwise useless API token in your bash history than to have a URL of a bare and uncontrolled web service in the same bash history, and now on the open internet.

If I were to design a service like that, I'd have an URL like domain.api/username/${token}, where the token can be changed and / or retited, should it become a target of a spam attack. Exporting this token once in the beginning of a shell session should not be hard; SSH even allows you do it with SendEnv.

That url is the demo one. I think the author have his own magic url for personal use

Yes that's correct. You control your own destiny. If you choose any of the demo topic names, you may be getting spam. If you choose your username, likely not. If you choose "phil-likes-dogs" then there's almost no chance someone will guess that.

It's just like with passwords.

I responded here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29723347

As for the retirable token, you are right. In the current approach this cannot be done. I have an open ticket for auth (optional) that I'll soon implement. I want to get it right, so if you have thoughts, I'd love input on it: https://github.com/binwiederhier/ntfy/issues/19

He is the rsync.

Oh my, I'm star struck. I've used rsync, written a about rsync (in my master thesis) and looked at rsync code a long time ago. Amazing :-D

To clarify, the user rsync runs the service rsync.net, AFAIK he didn't write the tool rsync (that was Andrew Tridgell, who now writes Ardupilot).

Yeah, just go ahead and assume rsync's gender pronoun.

Who's assuming? That's John Kozubik.

I guess it was me doing the assuming here.

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