pyritschard's comments

pyritschard | 3 years ago | on: Subtext – A multi-user BBS server for classic macOS

It refers to a technique also known as "port knocking" which consists of leaving a port closed by default and opening it upon receiving a message by another channel (in this case, a UDP packet).

It was mostly in use when TLS hadn't made it's way into most common protocols

pyritschard | 7 years ago | on: Clojure at Netflix (2013) [slides]

Hey, Exoscale CTO here,

Thanks for looking into the service. We're certainly not the cheapest in terms of pricing but I would also warn against using RAM prices as the sole way to gauge a service.

To drive low prices a lot of VPS providers tend to have a very liberal way of playing with overcommit, which we don't do. The same goes for CPU.

Our instances should be considered to higher-end families such as the C3 and here you'll see we're playing in the same field in terms of prices.

pyritschard | 7 years ago | on: OpenBSD Foundation Receives Silver Contribution from John Carmack

I expect the situation to change over time, OpenBSD has invested a lot in working well with KVM which most providers are relying on now anyway.

OpenBSD also has cloud-init support now[1] which makes interaction with terraform and ansible much simpler.

While the big three do not have officially supported templates, a few providers do, including Exoscale (disclaimer: CTO there).

[1]: https://github.com/exoscale/openbsd-cloud-init

pyritschard | 9 years ago | on: Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS?

Exoscale sits in the middle between AWS and Digital Ocean. It has a much narrower catalog than that of AWS but essential services needed to drive cloud application.

pyritschard | 9 years ago | on: OpenBSD 6.0 released

DO relies on KVM which OpenBSD has supported for a good while. If you are interested in something similar - including price-wise - to digital ocean with support for OpenBSD, I encourage you to try https://exoscale.ch

pyritschard | 9 years ago | on: Clojure.spec – Rationale and Overview

Yes, I've read and see the difference from schema. The huge advantage with this, is that even though the approach is different, it supersedes schema's abilities and it will be a require away for every library and application author.

pyritschard | 9 years ago | on: Clojure.spec – Rationale and Overview

This is an important move for the Clojure language. As with all dynamic languages, and exarcerberated by the fact that it encourages relying on data first - as opposed to say, classes in other languages - Clojure puts the onus on the developer to catch errors in data.

The clojure community as a whole embraced prismatic's schema as a way to provide occurence typing for data. Since library authors often tend to reduce their dependency surface, most libraries do not ship with it though.

With the inclusion of this in clojure core, it will now be possible to provide occurence typing at the edge of functions instead of tracking malformed input deep inside apps.

The racket-type contract notation is also a very welcome change from other similar approaches in my opinion.

[1]: https://github.com/plumatic/schema

pyritschard | 9 years ago | on: Why OpenBSD Is Important to Me

We also owe the OpenBSD team OpenSSH, which greatly benefits from their attention to detail and commitment to small improvements towards better security.

Of course software is never perfect, but it's nice to know the (small) subset of OpenBSD developers working on OpenSSH are still working on keeping the proverbial doors locked.

pyritschard | 10 years ago | on: Unikernels are unfit for production

The essential point the lengthy article makes revolves around debugging facilities for unikernels. While mostly true for MirageOS and the rest of the unikernel world today, OSv showed that it is quite possible to provide good instrumentation tooling for unikernels.

The smaller point about porting application (whether targetting unikernels that are specific to a language runtime or more generic ones like OSv and rumpkernels) is the most salient, it will probably restrict unikernel adoption.

For docker, if only to provide a good subtrate for providing dev environments for people running windows or Mac computers, it is very promising.

pyritschard | 10 years ago | on: Riemann – A network monitoring system

I'm very happy to see riemann featured here. I've been using it in production since early 2012 and contributed to it (intensively, at one point) as well.

It's been a breeze, rather worry free and its very good collectd support has enabled us to cover very interesting use cases at Exoscale.

pyritschard | 10 years ago | on: The Pithos Guide

You're a bit harsh, last one was 28 days ago :-). To be honest, except for the big chunk of work that signature v4 represents, the lack of commit/releases stems from the fact that it has been stable.

pyritschard | 10 years ago | on: Hitch – A Scalable TLS Proxy by Varnish

While not 100% necessary, header macros to implement lists, queues (and even trees, see: http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/sys/sys/tree.h?...) are common in C.

They first appear for kernel usage where the fact that they expanded to inline code in functions avoided creating too many stack-frames and provided optimization.

They do have the advantage of not relying on casting everything to "void *" or resort to callbacks for walking (see: TAILQ_FOREACH for instance).

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