Introducing FreeNAS Corral
In the TrueNAS blog, discover the latest in scalable data storage solutions. Stay updated on the latest innovations in TrueNAS technology.
Building account systems
Troy Hunt recently published a blog post titled “Authentication guidance for the modern era”. It has a big pile of solid advice on what…
The state of netbooting Raspberry Pis
Let's take a look at the state of netbooting for Raspberry Pis including how and why you'd build a cluster and how well containers play with network booting
Casync – A tool for distributing file system images
Posts and writings by Lennart Poettering
Netstat without netstat
Recently I was doing an assessment in a locked down and restricted environment. One of the first actions you tend to do when landing a shell on a [linux] box is to do some reconnaissance. This is both on host and network, as you want to determine what new access this host has given you. Normally you would run netstat…
Local and distributed query processing in CockroachDB
This blog post outlines how CockroachDB executes queries and shares Cockroach Labs' vision for future work on distributed processing.
1.1B taxi rides benchmark on the GPU- and PostgreSQL-powered BrytlytDB
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
Treating performance as a product: The technical story of Asana’s rewrite
Learn how the engineering team at Asana rewrote the Asana app to improve app performance and speed from an in-depth, technical perspective.
How Uploadcare Built a Stack That Handles 350M File API Requests per Day
Discover the tech stack used by Uploadcare. Explore 45 tools across 4 categories.
Bringing up 802.11ac on FreeBSD
I've been chipping away at bringing up 802.11ac on FreeBSD. I've been meaning to write this post for a while, but you know, life got in the ...
Introduction to Hierarchical State Machines
The formalism of Hierarchical State Machines (aka statecharts) makes the state machine approach truly applicable to real-life embedded systems. Read more.
Rediscovering the Intel AMT Vulnerability
On May 1, 2017 Intel disclosed the AMT vulnerability (INTEL-SA-00075), but details of that vulnerability were not made public. However, Tenable researchers were able to overcome this challenge and make Tenable the first to deliver Intel AMT vulnerability detection capabilities to customers, just minutes after Intel’s…
Amazon EBS Update – New Elastic Volumes Change Everything
It is always interesting to speak with our customers and to learn how the dynamic nature of their business and their applications drives their block storage requirements. These needs change over time, creating the need to modify existing volumes to add capacity or to change performance characteristics. Today’s 24×7…
The Peculiarly Quiet Decline and Fall of the KVM
Yes, that familiar little PC peripheral. The one that toggles a single keyboard/mouse/display ensemble between two or more connected machines.
PostgreSQL Benchmark on FreeBSD, CentOS, Ubuntu Debian and OpenSUSE
In this post, I’m going to show benchmark results of the recently released PostgreSQL 10.1. I’ve benchmarked the DB on these OSes (all are 64-bit):
Gryadka is not Paxos, so it's probably wrong
In the original version of this post, I claimed that gryadka , which claims to be built on top of a Paxos-backed CAS register, was incorrect by providing a “counter-example”.
Update and Build Prep
All systems operational
Taking a Look at CLR Thread Pool 'Thread Injection' Algorithm
As part of a never-ending quest to explore the CoreCLR source code I stumbled across the intriguing titled ‘HillClimbing.cpp’ source file. This post explains what it does and why.
68 things the CLR does before executing a single line of your code
Because the CLR is a managed environment there are several components within the runtime that need to be initialised before any of your code can be executed. This post will take a look at the EE (Execution Engine) start-up routine and examine the initialisation process in detail.
How Dirty COW works from the Linux kernel’s perspective
Dirty COW (CVE-2016-5195) is one of the most publicised local privilege escalation vulnerabilities in 2016, courtesy to its catchy name, cute logo, potential damages, and the fact that it was discovered in the wild by a researcher Phil Oester, meaning it was already under active use at the time of discovery.
Shadow Brokers exploits are patched or inactive on supported Windows platforms
Today, Microsoft triaged a large release of exploits made publicly available by Shadow Brokers. Understandingly, customers have expressed concerns around the risk this disclosure potentially creates. Our engineers have investigated the disclosed exploits, and most of the exploits are already patched. Below is our…
Further hardening glibc malloc() against single byte overflows
Introduction Back in 2014, while at Project Zero, I exploited a buffer overflow of a single NUL byte in glibc . Tavis Ormandy had found th...
IPv4 route lookup on Linux
Linux uses an LPC-trie for looking up routes. It provides good performance with low memory use even with millions of routes.