TechSNAP

TechSNAP

Jupiter Broadcasting

Systems, Network, and Administration Podcast. Every two weeks TechSNAP covers the stories that impact those of us in the tech industry, and all of us that follow it. Every episode we dedicate a portion of the show to answer audience questions, discuss best practices, and solving your problems.

52 minutes 9 seconds

430: All Good Things
It's a storage showdown as Jim and Wes bust some performance myths about RAID and ZFS.

Plus our favorite features from Fedora 32, and why Wes loves DNF.
Links:
29 May 2020, 7:15 am
30 minutes 45 seconds

429: Curious About Caddy
Jim and Wes take the latest release of the Caddy web server for a spin, investigate Intel's Comet Lake desktop CPUs, and explore the fight over 5G between the US Military and the FCC.
Links:
15 May 2020, 7:15 am
36 minutes

428: RAID Reality Check
We dive deep into the world of RAID, and discuss how to choose the right topology to optimize performance and resilience.

Plus Cloudflare steps up its campaign to secure BGP, and why you might want to trade in cron for systemd timers.
Links:
1 May 2020, 7:15 am
51 minutes 29 seconds

427: Gigahertz Games
Jim finally gets his hands on an AMD Ryzen 9 laptop, some great news about Wi-Fi 6e, and our take on FreeBSD on the desktop.

Plus Intel's surprisingly overclockable laptop CPU, why you shouldn't freak out about 5G, and the incredible creativity of the Demoscene.
Links:
17 April 2020, 7:15 am
31 minutes 17 seconds

426: Storage Stories
We take a look at Cloudflare's impressive Linux disk encryption speed-ups, and explore how zoned storage tools like dm-zoned and zonefs might help mitigate the downsides of Shingled Magnetic Recording.

Plus we celebrate WireGuard's inclusion in the Linux 5.6 kernel, and fight some exFAT FUD.
Links:
- WireGuard VPN makes it to 1.0.0—and into the next Linux kernel — It's a good day for WireGuard users—DKMS builds will soon be behind us.
- Linux 5.6 Is The Most Exciting Kernel In Years With So Many New Features
- fs: New zonefs file system — zonefs is a very simple file system exposing each zone of a zoned block device as a file. This is intended to simplify implementation of application zoned block device raw access support by allowing switching to the well known POSIX file API rather than relying on direct block device file ioctls and read/write.
- Ama-ZNS! Zonefs File-System Will Land with Linux® 5.6
- What is Zoned Storage and the Zoned Storage Initiative? — Zoned Storage is a new paradigm in storage motivated by the incredible explosion of data. Our data-driven society is increasingly dependent on data for every-day life and extreme scale data management is becoming a necessity.
- Linux Kernel Support - ZonedStorage.io
- dm-zoned — The dm-zoned device mapper target exposes a zoned block device as a regular block device.
- Device Mapper - ZonedStorage.io
- What are PMR and SMR hard disk drives?
- Beware of SMR drives in PMR clothing — WD and Seagate are both submarining Drive-managed SMR (DM-SMR) drives into channels, disguised as "normal" drives.
- Beware of SMR drives in PMR clothing [Reddit]
- The exFAT filesystem is coming to Linux—Paragon software’s not happy about it — When software and operating system giant Microsoft announced its support for inclusion of the exFAT filesystem directly into the Linux kernel back in August, it didn't get a ton of press coverage. But filesystem vendor Paragon Software clearly noticed this month's merge of the Microsoft-approved, largely Samsung-authored version of exFAT into the VFS for-next repository, which will in turn merge into Linux 5.7—and Paragon doesn't seem happy about it.
- The New Microsoft exFAT File-System Driver Is Set To Land With Linux 5.7
- Speeding up Linux disk encryption - The Cloudflare Blog — Encrypting data at rest is vital for Cloudflare with more than 200 data centres across the world. In this post, we will investigate the performance of disk encryption on Linux and explain how we made it at least two times faster for ourselves and our customers.
- Add inline dm-crypt patch and xtsproxy Crypto API patch
3 April 2020, 7:15 am
32 minutes 53 seconds

425: Ryzen Gets Real
We take a look at AMD's upcoming line of Ryzen 4000 mobile CPUs, and share our first impressions of Ubuntu 20.04's approach to ZFS on root.

Plus Let's Encrypt's certificate validation mix-up, Intel's questionable new power supply design, and more.
Links:
20 March 2020, 7:15 am
28 minutes 19 seconds

424: AMD Inside
Cloudflare recently embarked on an epic quest to choose a CPU for its next-generation server build, so we explore the importance of requests per watt, the benefits of full memory encryption, and why AMD won.

Plus Mozilla's rollout of DNS over HTTPS has begun, a big milestone for Let's Encrypt, and more.
Links:
6 March 2020, 8:15 am
29 minutes 36 seconds

423: Hopeful for HAMR
We explore the potential of heat-assisted magnetic recording and get excited about a possibly persistent L2ARC.

Plus Jim's journeys with Clear Linux, and why Ubuntu 18.04.4 is a maintenance release worth talking about.
Links:
- Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS: here's what's new — It's not as shiny and exciting as entirely new versions, of course, but it does pack in some worthwhile security and bugfix upgrades, as well as support for more and newer hardware.
- 18.04.4 - Ubuntu Wiki
- MobaXterm — Enhanced terminal for Windows with X11 server, tabbed SSH client, network tools and much more.
- Linux distro review: Intel’s own Clear Linux OS — There's not much question that Clear Linux is your best bet if you want to turn in the best possible benchmark numbers. The question not addressed here is, what's it like to run Clear Linux as a daily driver? We were curious, so we took it for a spin.
- Clear Linux* Project — Clear Linux OS is an open source, rolling release Linux distribution optimized for performance and security, from the Cloud to the Edge, designed for customization, and manageability.
- swupd — Documentation for Clear Linux* project
- clr-boot-manager: Kernel & Boot Loader Management
- Cannot compile zfs for 5.5-rc2 · Issue #9745 · zfsonlinux/zfs
- Persistent L2ARC might be coming to ZFS on Linux — The primary ARC is kept in system RAM, but an L2ARC device can be created from one or more fast disks. In a ZFS pool with one or more L2ARC devices, when blocks are evicted from the primary ARC in RAM, they are moved down to L2ARC rather than being thrown away entirely. In the past, this feature has been of limited value, both because indexing a large L2ARC occupies system RAM which could have been better used for primary ARC and because L2ARC was not persistent across reboots.
- Persistent L2ARC by gamanakis · Pull Request #9582 · zfsonlinux/zfs — This feature implements a light-weight persistent L2ARC metadata structure that allows L2ARC contents to be recovered after a reboot. This significantly eases the impact a reboot has on read performance on systems with large caches.
- LINUX Unplugged 303: Stateless and Dateless — We visit Intel to figure out what Clear Linux is all about and explain a few tricks that make it unique.
- LINUX Unplugged Blog: Clear Linux OS 2019
- HAMR don’t hurt ’em: laser-assisted hard drives are coming in 2020 — Although the 2012 "just around the corner" HAMR drives seem to have been mostly vapor, the technology is a reality now. Seagate has been trialing 16TB HAMR drives with select customers for more than a year and claims that the trials have proved that its HAMR drives are "plug and play replacements" for traditional CMR drives, requiring no special care and having no particular poor use cases compared to the drives we're all used to.
- HAMR Milestone: Seagate Achieves 16TB Capacity on Internal HAMR Test Units
- Western Digital debuts 18TB and 20TB near-MAMR disk drives
- Previously on TechSNAP 341: HAMR Time — We've got bad news for Wifi-lovers as the KRACK hack takes the world by storm; We have the details & some places to watch to make sure you stay patched. Plus, some distressing revelations about third party access to your personal information through some US mobile carriers. Then we cover the ongoing debate over HAMR, MAMR, and the future of hard drive technology & take a mini deep dive into the world of elliptic curve cryptography.
22 February 2020, 2:00 am
23 minutes 37 seconds

422: Multipath Musings
We take a look at a few exciting features coming to Linux kernel 5.6, including the first steps to multipath TCP.

Plus the latest Intel speculative execution vulnerability, and Microsoft's troubled history with certificate renewal.
Links:
7 February 2020, 8:15 am
25 minutes 9 seconds

421: Firewall Fun
We explore the latest round of Windows vulnerabilities and Jim shares his journey adding OPNsense to his firewall family.

Plus a look back at Apollo-era audio that's still relevant today with the surprising story of the Quindar tones.
Links:
24 January 2020, 8:15 am
24 minutes 10 seconds

420: Choose Your Own Compiler
Compiling the Linux kernel with Clang has never been easier, so we explore this alternative compiler and what it brings to the ecosystem.

Plus Debian's continued init system debate, and our frustrations over 5G reporting.
Links:
10 January 2020, 8:15 am
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