WirelessMoves

The 8 TB drive I use for all stuff that may or may not be useful in the future again is filling up faster than prices are dropping for bigger drives. In the past, I’ve always ‘upgraded’ after drive capacities have doubled. But currently, the price for a 16 TB external drive still hovers around €300. And since I always keep several backups, that price would multiply. So that’s not quite in the cards for the time being. So I did the next best thing and had a look for duplicates. Now how hard can that be, I thought.

Continue reading The 8TB Backup And The Search For Duplicates

When 3GPP set out to define the 5G core network (5GC), it used all the latest and greatest web technologies to radically reshape core network architecture. One tiny part of this is the use of HTTP/2 for signaling between functions. This made me wonder just how on the Internet today, web browsers and servers decide if HTTP/1.1 or HTTP/2 is used for communication. Yes, I went off a bit on a tangent there. It can’t be the TCP port, as port 443 is used with both protocols for encrypted connections. So there must be something else.

And off we go with part two with a summary of things ‘that moved me’ in 2020. Apart from the wireless network related topics I wrote about in part 1, the year 2020 was certainly the year video conferencing had a breakthrough for many people. As I value my privacy I was not really keen to have all my meetings over infrastructure and software provided by large 3rd party companies that use closed source software and don’t give much about privacy and confidentiality. So I set up my first open source Jitsi video conferencing server in a German data center for private conversations and meetings. Much easier than I thought! I then gave a talk about it at DiVOC (‘Digital verteiltes Online Chaos’), the first conference gone online in the year 2020 I attended and was run-over by interested people. And from there, things escalated quickly.

There must be few people on this planet that have not been affected by the Covid-19 pandemic this year. It has certainly brought profound changes in my way of working and in the things I did this year. So while the pandemic restricted me to stay at home most of the time, it ‘moved me a lot’ in other ways, which is I why I had to start my annual ‘Things That Moved Me’ post for 2020 with this topic. As always I can hardly believe that another year has passed again already, so let’s dive into it:

Now that I have my ZFS filesystem spanning several drives in place on my Z440, I wanted to get an idea of how this setup is performing together with the underlying LUKS encryption. And while I am at it, the other questions I had in mind were: How does this compare to the ext4/LUKS combination I use on my notebook and how does the write performance look like from inside a virtual machine running on my Z440. A lot of obvious results but also quite a number of surprises.

This is a quick follow-up post to the previous one in which I’ve written about how straight forward it is to use ZFS to combine several physical SSDs or disk drives to use the combined capacity for a file system. The one thing I left out in the description was how to encrypt the setup. While ZFS encryption is said to have a good performance starting with version 0.8.4, Ubuntu 20.04 I use at the time of writing is still using 0.8.3. The advice of ‘the Internet’ is thus to use LUKS as an encryption layer below ZFS.