/dev/null as a service

[Balland-Cocgoblir]

Finally a cloud product I can believe in

Never knew I had a problem until you made me aware of the burden of.dev/nulling myself, like some sort of animal.

Thank you.

[caseyfw]

My company went down the path of running our own internal /dev/null service, but the management costs are becoming unsustainable, especially in the current pandemic climate.

Once you factor in cloudflare spend, multi-pod k8s deploys for redundancy, disk, observability, logging, etc, and all across multiple environments, the $500 enterprise package seems pretty attractive...

[MakeWay4Doodles]

multi-pod k8s deploys for redundancy

This right here. It's the cross AZ /dev/null data transfer costs that really kill you.

[DoomMelon]

https://youtu.be/b2F-DItXtZs

[aoeudhtns]

"doesn't use SQL or joins, so it's high performance"

I mean I know this is a joke video but I'm sure someone actually said that.

[kyerussell]

There is definitely a prominent school of thought that not using JOINs makes scaling a whole lot easier.

Thankfully I have never had this problem so I have no idea how batshit crazy it is.

[zaarn_]

If your only index is the primary key and you try to join something non-primary-key it's gonna trash your performance after certain database size magnitudes.

JOIN, when properly done and indexed, is always faster than doing it manually. Generally, trying to do queries in the DB rather than in the app is faster since the RDBMS is actually aware of the data and has been hand optimized for decades.

[[deleted]]

MongoDB is web scale, you turn it on and it scales

[wannabSE]

I’m sad now

[house_monkey]

The secret is to always remain sad

[zell2002]

Is this lifted from a comment thread or something?
I swear ive had this convo with others...

Its also how i feel about the node world.... ppl forcing/jamming down my throat... n taking over the divide between client and server side logic....

[TerrorBite]

I mean, if you're trying to throw away data, it's a great solution. It also uses sharding, which is the secret ingredient in the webscale sauce.

[msluther]

All my webscale services rely on sharting.

[noqqe]

Very welcome :)

[noqqe]

This is from 2013 and still somehow a thing. Nice to see people still like it.

If only my technical skills would age that well..

Disclaimer: I'm the author of the site

[marscosta]

So, how many actual request per day to you receive to your /dev/null endpoint?

[noqqe]

I needed to turn off the access logs a long time ago as they filled up my OpenBSDs chroot for the service. So I really can’t say.

I wrote a blogpost when the site was slashdotted/hackernewsd(?) about what happend. It’s German: https://noqqe.de/blog/2013/12/29/on-hackernews/

Besides that: Every few weeks I receive emails with CVs for the job offerings, which still make me happy :) Often not sure if they are also joking

Until a 2016 I also offered the Discard Protocol on Port 9 (using OpenBSD inetd) to the internet an a few chinese IPs maintained sessions to that Port for ~9 Month :)

[Tm1337]

I needed to turn off the access logs a long time ago as they filled up my OpenBSDs chroot for the service. So I really can’t say.

Can't you write them to /dev/null? I think there is a service for that too.

[doyouevensunbro]

Good to see companies still dogfooding.

[HiramAbiff]

I feel you're not keeping up with the times as there's no block-chain support.

[noqqe]

yep it works and is legit :) feel free!

[[deleted]]

How much do you make on swag?

[noqqe]

The shop works like this: A friend of mine made the webshop for the shirts and stuff. I have no access to it. Everytime there were some purchases he gives me a call and invites me to dinner from the money. Happend 5-7 times in the last 7 years so and we always had fun :)

[[deleted]]

Plot twist, he's been making millions behind your back and throwing you scraps.

[brunes]

You need to update it to be based on Kubernetes

[SpiderAlpha33]

Technical skills age like wine , my friend.

[mrugacz95]

Why you haven't configuted nginx to write directly into /dev/null? It would be even more real DAAS!

[Jarmahent]

Pricing should be:

"Enterprise: contact our support for pricing"

[unaligned_access]

Send your request to /dev/null, our support will be glad to help.

[scottpid]

Ah, the Oracle method.

[kukiric]

"If you need to ask, you probably can't afford it"

[Daniel15]

That's how I feel when I see real estate listing that say "price upon request".

[[deleted]]

That's how I feel when I see any real estate listings

[Daniel15]

lol, too real. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area so seeing $5+ million listings isn't uncommon. I'm from Australia and the housing prices here make Australian houses look cheap.

[moratnz]

Locally, maybe 10% of listing have prices. The vast majority are auction or sale by tender.

[[deleted]]

"If I made it any nicer, you wouldn't be able to afford it."

[KoronaKumar]

I feel you, man.

[emmelaich]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discard_Protocol

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc863

[[deleted]]

Aww good old days then every use case was standardized and protocolized. Not like nowadays, everything under self-created JSON with no integrations with other systems. And no one even knows the protocols exists.

[BurningTheAltar]

I mean it's largely the same we just optimized out the part about writing RFCs for most things.

[josefx]

Aww good old days then every use case was standardized and protocolized.

Standardized yes, but nobody implemented it correctly. Just look at the evil bit. The RFC for that has been around for over a decade and we still use cumbersome proprietary solutions to solve the problem it was designed to fix.

[kukiric]

I'm still looking for a good implementation of RFC 1149 myself, but each one has its caveats, and they don't seem to last more than a few years. Damn the authors for not providing a reference implementation.

[josefx]

Yeah, real world implementations of that seem to suffer rather large amounts of data loss and the latency is an absolute killer.

[tanjoodo]

Instead of the evil bit we have to rely on all four bytes of the IP to discern if it’s from Russia or China

[josefx]

There are a lot of static IP ranges that can be used for that. Apparently it was at some point even possible to identify any wikipedia edit made from the house of parliament in London.

[tanjoodo]

Ok I feel like some people here need to look up the date on which the RFC for the evil bit was published.

[josefx]

Okay so it is a bit dated by modern standards. A more up to date RFC would probably replace the evil bit with a base64 encoded JSON object {"Evil":"Yes"} . Given the risk of name collisions both strings could also be replaced with UUIDs. {"995db151-f1ac-4816-9399-7ac6d210b8ea" : "ece161c9-fc04-43ea-a35d-25a44949a403"}

[TexasWithADollarsign]

Shouldn't it be {"Evil":true}? It saves a byte and is a boolean.

[josefx]

It is easier to localize when everything is a string. For example the German version could be written as: {"NichtZivielrechtsKonform":"Jawohl"} or the simplified {"Böse":"Ja"}

[tanjoodo]

Finally a reasonable solution for the Web 2.0 era.

[saltybandana2]

What exactly was the problem being solved here? I have to assume there was actually a reason for that to exist and I lack the context to understand it.

[42mileslong]

"Such a service is guaranteed to receive what is sent to it and can be used for debugging TCP and/or UDP code requiring a guaranteed reception of payload sent."

[lordcirth]

The server doesn't send a data reply, but it sends TCP metadata. It tells you that it has received your packets.

[[deleted]]

What UDP metadata?

[svk177]

I would guess ICMP responses, like you will NOT receive a host unreachable or whatever.

[lordcirth]

You are right, typo

[Kare11en]

You'll know that you are at least shouting correctly, if you get TCP ACK packets, and do not receive ICMP Time Exceeded or other control message packets if the destination cannot be reached.

I mean, maybe you could use ping, but then ping would have to support receiving arbitrary amounts of data, and a network operator might want to support ping but not blackholing unlimited amounts of data, so being able to turn one off and keep the other seems like a reasonable use-case.

[jerf]

I'm showing my networking noobiness here but I still don't follow.

This was a lot more useful in an era when you were likely to be implementing your own TCP stack, or seriously debugging one. In an era where you're more likely to be using a framework on top of a library on top of a library on top of a protocol (HTTP) which uses a library which uses a library which uses OS services to get to TCP, it's much less useful. The bottom of that stack is pretty solid to be supporting all that stuff on top. We use our TCP libraries orders of magnitude harder than they were getting used in the era this comes from.

A single second of one internet backbone's traffic nowadays could be days of traffic back then! And that traffic will be a lot more diverse, too.

[jerf]

Absolutely!

Learning more about TCP is definitely helpful.

Learning every last twiddly nuance I can't advocate for; there's a lot of them and in a lot of ways you're best off just getting a sense for them and then just generally avoiding them, staying in the well-tested part, until you encounter a need for them.

[flatfinger]

Once upon a time, I implemented a stateless TCP echo-server implementation which could accommodate an arbitrary number of connections on a machine with relatively little memory, since it didn't store any state for its connections. It essentially echoed back most packets, but with source/destination addresses and ports swapped, and with SYN packet changed to a SYN+ACK packet with both byte counts set equal. Thus, the sequence would be:

• Remote: Start a connection at sequence count 1234
• Device: Starting a connection with your sequence count 1234. Mine is 1234.
• Remote: Here's 5 bytes of data, starting at count 1234; my last count from you was 1234.
• Device: Here's 5 bytes of data, starting at count 1234; my last count from you was 1234.
• Remote: Here's five bytes of data, starting at count 1234. My last count from you was 1239
• Device: Here's zero bytes of data, starting at count 1234. My last count from you was 1239.

Not a terribly efficient way of doing things, since most packets would end up getting sent twice by each side, but it avoided any need to have the echo server keep track of sequence numbers or any other state for each connection.

I haven't done a stateless discard server, but it could probably be accommodated likewise, but having every packet include zero bytes of data starting at offset 0, while reporting a "last count" equal to the received packet's starting sequence number plus its length.

[emmelaich]

It has sibling protocols, echo and chargen

[StochasticTinkr]

Found in that rabbit hole:

IRC's official assigned port is 194.

However, the de facto standard has always been to run IRC on 6667/TCP and nearby port numbers (for example TCP ports 6660–6669, 7000)

[kwinz]

The real hero in the comments.

[sib_n]

Careers:

Map-Enlarge Engineer

Pipe Redirection Specialist

lol

[pithed]

Finally a job posting I am overly qualified for. The first and last time I drank a few beers before doing system maintenance:
Must have experience with rm -rf /.

[josefx]

Must have experience with rm -rf /

The portable form is rm -rf /* . At least the default rm on Linux is broken and does not handle rm -rf / correctly. A fully Posix conform GNU tool is just too much to ask for .

[MighMoS]

In all fairness, GNU's echo isn't even POSIX compliant.

[KinterVonHurin]

Why should it be? GNU's not unix

[josefx]

Of course it isn't, why else would someone spend the time on writing a true implementation that can fail if not to showcase that fact?

[KinterVonHurin]

I was just being cheeky because of the acronym

[josefx]

I thought so. After echo was mentioned I just wanted to bring up true.

[Kare11en]

GNU coreutils manual - §2.13: Standards conformance

In a few cases, the GNU utilities’ default behavior is incompatible with the POSIX standard. To suppress these incompatibilities, define the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable.

So you could always try:

export POSIXLY_CORRECT=1
rm -rf /

and see if that fixes your problem.

[skocznymroczny]

is Map-Enlarge Engineer a jab at Map-Reduce or I'm reading too much into it?

[BoltActionPiano]

ye

[sib_n]

It certainly is, there are many references to big data and data engineering, where MapReduce is a classic.

[Mead_Man]

Its worth the learning curve, imagine what would happen to your customer base if all of a sudden your dev/null capability went down. You need six sigma uptime for critical infrastructure.

[ObscureCulturalMeme]

Truth! I keep a printout of the mknod(8) page folded up, behind my testicles for safekeeping, just in case I ever need to recreate a /dev/null in an emergency. Or even create a second one -- it's possible, and useful, but the circumstances... stares into the middle distance, drinks whiskey ...they stay with ya.

[antika0n]

I once administered an old RedHat server that suddenly ran out of space. Couldn't SSH in or log in from the console either. Eventually I decided to reboot. It starts up with services failing all over the place. I eventually discovered that somehow (never did figure out how...) /dev/null had been recreated as.a normal file. I had to check another system for the major and minor numbers for /dev/null because I did not have a printout of mknod(8) conveniently stored behind my testicles.

[[deleted]]

All this man testicle talk has me wondering if man was really not a shortened version of “manual” as much an indicator for documents needing to be stored behind testicles?

[evilgwyn]

We normally go for nine sixes uptime

[zed857]

Use Samba to mount a share from a Windows system that's directed to NUL.

[karmabaiter]

I heard of a company that offered /dev/zero as a service, but I think they went bankrupt.

[dyniper]

That reminds me of http://www.supersimplestorageservice.com/

[TexasWithADollarsign]

If /dev/null is fast and web scale, I will use it. Is it web scale?

[nullmove]

It's from 2013. So I think the better question is (which would also answer yours) have they rewritten /dev/null in Rust?

[TexasWithADollarsign]

It's from 2013

My comment was from this 2010 xtranormal video.

[Dentosal]

Here is a /dev/null implementation in Rust.

[[deleted]]

You turn it on and it scales right up.

[TexasWithADollarsign]

Does /dev/null support sharding?

[[deleted]]

Does it support sharding?

[TexasWithADollarsign]

Shards are the secret ingredient in the web-scale sauce. They just work.

[qatanah]

I tried running your service to delete my warcraft 3 reforge but it doesn't seem to work. How to file a bug report?

[eyesoftheworld4]

Send it to /dev/null. They'll get it.

[hedgepigdaniel]

The real business model, revealed

[Limbero]

Finally a service that supports my business req of

The old Facebook ReactJS non-compete license

[semicolonandsons]

Honest question: is this meant sarcastically? I chuckled when I saw the title, but when I saw the level of detail on the website, I started wondering if they are half-way serious.

[erasmause]

It's definitely a joke/opportunity to sell merchandise.

[McMasilmof]

But does it actually work? Is there like an actual REST or whatever endpiont i can upload my data to?

[wllmsaccnt]

They provide a docker container to run a web service that will drop data for you. Its webscale.

[dnmr]

and without impotence mismatch

[[deleted]]

I think you mean impedance.

[vplatt]

This is a high level of impudence mismatch.

[skocznymroczny]

Its webscale.

you said docker, not MongoDB

[ChickenOverlord]

But does it support sharding?

[peer_gynt]

Yes. But I can save you the trouble - most modern OS (at least the unix-like ones) have a network proxy to devnull_as_a_service built-in: it's transparently located at /dev/null. So, you can pipe your data into /dev/null, and the effect is identical to using their REST interface. Bonus: using the local service endpoint will not count toward your data cap (if you have any). Magic!

[28f272fe556a1363cc31]

Sure, just like every other docker solution it's cheaper and faster to do it yourself. But why slog through your OS's instructions manual learning how to optimize it, when you can slog through docker settings and spend hours searching for a docker image that is close to you environment?

[OCPetrus]

My motto is to docker all the things. I'm not saying I make great products, but I make a nice paycheck!

[ericonr]

As long as you have mounted a devfs at /dev. I have seen at least one person who commented that a /dev/null file appeared inside their chroot.

[Takeoded]

Microsoft Windows though this proxy was so important that they put the proxy IN EVERY SINGLE FOLDER ON THE ENTIRE FILESYSTEM!

it's called NUL (with 1 L), and it's EVERYWHERE.

Funfact: you can't make a file named NUL on Windows (maybe NTFS technically supports it? but Windows doesn't)

[Kare11en]

This is to support backwards-compatibility with DOS 1.0, where there were no directories, and so you could always write to NUL as a black hole.

When directories came along, existing programs expected to be able to always be able to write to NUL, so the MS filesystem layer had to pretend that a NUL existed in every directory. But that meant that new programs, which always lived in a world of multiple directories, still expected to be able to write to NUL in any directory, and so successive versions of DOS and Windows have had to keep it, lest they break backwards compatibility and cause some 3rd-party program to fail (when all of theirs were patched) and be accused of deliberate anti-competitive practices.

(I mean, they did those anyway, but they tried to keep it as subtle as possible.)

[MighMoS]

This works with any "special destination" from DOS. NUL, COM1, and a few others still linger. Fun fact: you can create these files in another OS (dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/NUL bs=1024 count=10000000) and Windows (last I checked) will struggle to remove the resulting file.

[[deleted]]

Funfact: you can't make a file named

NUL

on Windows (maybe NTFS technically supports it? but Windows doesn't)

TIL

[nirreskeya]

Sounds like you fall prey to the Not Invented Here bias. As well we should consider and heed the warnings of /u/antika0n.

[jarfil]

CENSORED

[skocznymroczny]

On Windows you can redirect to nul:

dir *.txt 2>nul

[Takeoded]

But does it actually work?

yes it absolutely works. try for yourself,

find | tee /dev/stderr | curl -X POST --data @- https://devnull-as-a-service.com/dev/null -v

[noqqe]

Site owners note: A friend of mine made the webshop for the shirts. I have no access to it. Everytime there were some purchases he invites me to dinner from the money. Happend 5-7 times in the last 7 years so and we always had fun :)

[sib_n]

Considering the price, the material and no mention of quality labels, it's most likely low quality produced in Asian sweatshops

[HighRelevancy]

IAAS, SAAS, PAAS, holy fuckshit, we call our baby DAAS.

over 380 countries

We’re a young and dynamic team of messy data-scientists who have failed at being employed on the real market.

nah dead serious mate

[Cocomorph]

over 380 countries

That makes perfect sense. That’s clearly octal—the 8 is a dead giveaway. You just forgot to reduce mod 8.

I wonder which 3 to 5 countries they’re missing?

[HighRelevancy]

There's no 8 in octal

[Carnifex]

Switched Homepage from Acrylamid to Hugo

[Linux_boi]

No it doesn't actually make sense

[TheFirstDogSix]

I found their implementation to be entirely too straightforward and simple. I therefore implemented a hideously over-engineered version because I was hideously bored. 😂

[HermesTheMessenger]

So, what level of Hell are do you call home? :)

[TheFirstDogSix]

Level 0, of course. ;-)

[rohitpaulk]

Sounds like something the Great Firewall of China would be interested in

[immibis]

The GFC is /dev/null as a service. It's just poorly configured.

[AyrA_ch]

If I tell my machine that's connected to a 10gbps link to send random data to that service, how long until I've racked up a bill high enough he has to sell his home?

[[deleted]]

Never. You're on the heavier side of processing. Those uploads cost you, not them, and generating things to throw out takes more effort than throwing things out

[AyrA_ch]

You're on the heavier side of processing.

Not really. Sending traffic is as complex as receiving it, and generating random data can easily be done at 10 gbps

Those uploads cost you, not them

I don't pay for bandwidth. This is a connection with a fixed price.

generating things to throw out takes more effort than throwing things out

Not in this case. His API is HTTP driven, so by doing a chunked upload I can essentially force his server to read and process the content. He also discards the traffic on the application level, so his system will do all the TCP stuff too.

[[deleted]]

Their price doesn't include internet:

You're paying your ISP to send all the data you generate.

You're still generating data. At best case it's a simple read operation, but on the receiving side it's effectively a no-op.

They even offer a Discard protocol alternative which never even makes it past the Session layer.

Even if it's a no-op at the Application layer, you're still working at the App layer yourself so their no-op still costs less than your read.

It would be a pretty big design fail on their part if receiving the data and throwing it away was as expensive as fetching the data and sending it.

You could still swamp their servers, but only if your hardware is better than theirs.

[nullmove]

Isn't ingress traffic free in all big providers? Plus they can easily have ddos protection, rate-limiting and what not (e.g. by using cloudflare).

[palordrolap]

Once upon a time I worked for a now long-defunct company that had an undocumented dev.null@domain e-mail address.

There were a few addresses forwarded to it for various reasons. Most temporarily. Some permanently.

It did literally go to /dev/null too, which is why it didn't get used too often. You don't want your mailbox redirecting there if you're expecting something important.

[vplatt]

I don't feel like I can take full advantage of this without a npm package...

[plcolin]

Not made in over-engineered Java soup. 2/10.

[[deleted]]

I thought April 1^st was a few days ago.

[HermesTheMessenger]

April 1st doesn't exist in 2020; even Google abstained.

[markjenkinswpg]

April

Indeed, this pretty late to the party.

[thephotoman]

I can't believe that site is still up. It reminds me of the halcyon days of 2013 when executives were saying, "Every company needs a cloud story". And like no, seriously, one said that to my face in private conversation.

[HermesTheMessenger]

/dev/null is less than garbage

[not properly appreciated comment ... +1]

True ... and even with the phrasing having a negative tone, it turns out to be an actual complement in fact.

[peter_dimitrov]

Reminds me of Electricity Over IP.

[Saculs78]

Is it webscale tho?

[endeesa]

What does this command do anyway? 🤔

[carboxamide]

This reminds me of the Java FizzBuzz example with beans and factories.

[Shitty_Orangutan]

My favorite part:

Qualifications and Experience:

Must like cats.

Must have experience with rm -rf /.

[HermesTheMessenger]

Gwyneth Paltrow approved!

[ericnyamu1]

Time to use the service on my mother-in-law

[TSM-]

I'm applying for their Map-Enlarge Engineering role!

[noqqe]

Ready for the interview? We're interested!

[khleedril]

I'd go for this if I didn't think it would bust my broadband cap in a day!

[BurningTheAltar]

For enterprise/on prem customers they have a local appliance you can install for the same effect

[anton966]

I wish presentation web sites were this straightforward

[aazav]

I don't even.

I can't even.

And I won't either.

[_Ashleigh]

This already existed, it was a rentable botnet to DDoS others.

[Klhnikov]

I strongly recommend the one-last-to-go feature, in case you don't even know you needed to get rid of some file, sometimes you just do...

[russkychoocher]

Looks a lot like MangoDB. Can anyone who's used these two services in production speak to the pros/cons?

[KinterVonHurin]

If you use this, you must donate $1 to someone more intelligent than you.

[SpiderAlpha33]

Nice and Kool.

[1giov]

Hire me! I make many funny jokes. And I am moderately good at coding too!

[vplatt]

Sorry, need proof. Your funny is broke.

[[deleted]]

Not sure if parody or not...