The rsync algorithm (1996) [pdf]
andrew.cmu.edu
andrew.cmu.edu
This small document shows what computer science looked like to me when I was just getting started: a way to make computers more efficient and smarter, to solve real problems. I wish more people who claim to be "computer scientists" or "engineers" would actually work on real problems like this (efficient file sync) instead of having to spend time learning how to use the new React API or patching the f-up NextJS CVE that's affecting a multitude of services.
If the same level of vulnerability was as prevalent today as it was back then, civilization might collapse overnight.
When your life is set like that why risk trying to defraud someone a the cost of a nice suit when that's something that can be done legally and written off as a business expense on taxes?
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 requiring a password, was much less discoverable or exploitable than services exposed to the internet, today.
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.
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.
it fixed by itself, without any fixes from my part. happened many times.
asked for help to a senior, guy ran strace and found a read waiting in /dev/random. and of course it solved by itself any time I checked because I was moving the mouse!
controversially but acceptably, we had linked it to urandom and move on
how fast that guy used strace and analyzed the syscalls inspired me to be better at linux
That doesn't seem to be accurate. Wikipedia says, by the end of "2000 the number of users had grown to 2 million"
> everybody was using ssh because there wasn't any alternative
I already listed TWO of the most popular alternatives.
> the mouse-jiggling thing... not specifically a PuttyGen thing. On linux
Parent specifically said "windows client installation." Putty was very common on Windows. PuttyGen specifically and prominently told the user to move their mouse... etc. etc.
I can understand how, if your whole world was Windows 3.1 and 95, you'd feel that way about security at the time.
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/whatever versions of each of those files.
At the time there were those who were very vocal about their opinion of using maildir in this kind of capacity, likening it to abuse of the filesystem. And if that was stupid, then my use of hard links certainly multiplied that stupidity.
Perhaps I was simply not very smart at that time.
But it was actually fun to fit that together, and it was kind of amazing to watch rsync perform this job both automatically and without complaint between a pair of particularly not-fast (256kbps?) DOCSIS connections from Roadrunner.
It worked fine. Whenever I needed to go back in time for some reason, the information was reliably present at the other end with adequate granularity -- with just a couple of cron jobs, rsync, and maybe a little bit of bash script to automate it all.
If you ever need to do something like this again, it's often faster to parallelize rsync. One tool that provides this is fpsync:
How he did manage to avoid lawsuits from Microsoft is beyond me.
[1] Server Message Block:
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.
Then they realized interoperability could make them more money, and they invited him and his team to Redmond for a week of working with MS engineers to understand the latest protocol versions. Oh wait, no, it was because the EU forced them. https://www.theregister.com/2007/12/21/samba_microsoft_agree...
Similar with header files. Issues arise if there is a "misuse" to derive actually not a compatible but competing solution.
One alternative I'd like to try is Google's abandoned CDC[1], which claims to be up to 30x faster than rsync in certain scenarios. Does anyone know if there is a maintained fork with full Linux support?
I always alias rsync to:
'/usr/bin/rsync --archive --xattrs --acls --hard-links --progress --rsh="ssh -p PORT -l USER"'
I almost never use any other program for file transfers between computers.
Fun surprise, rsync uses file size and modified time first to see if the files are identical. I build these ISOs with nix. Nix sets the time to Jan 1st 1970 for reproducible builds, and I suspect the ISOs are padded out to the next sector. So rsync was not noticing the new ISO images when I made small changes to config files until I added the --checksum flag.
I think it'd be a good idea for rsync to not trust timestamp 0.
By avoiding that one step and using rsync instead, you're resigning yourself to "send 600MiBs" over the network for every tiny config change. Not a good trade-off.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43605846
Most openbsd people I know install the real version from ports.
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.
If, however, you just want a copy of a block device on another system, like for weekly backup (our case), it's probably overkill. Especially as to keep it truly consistent you need to run in the mode where writes are acked only once the remote AND local devices have it.
My VMs are running on ganeti, which has a mode where the backing device can be DRBD and written to another host. Which works great if you have the extra disc space and can deal with the latency. Also allows you to live migrate VMs between the two hosts.
In my case I ultimately want the copy off-site, so DRBD isn't really a great fit.
DRBD is very good stuff though, I've used it for decades for HA database servers and the like.
It never crossed my mind Linux at some point only had 2441 files and you could actually parse the code that went through a new version, that time has sailed