Month: October 2019

Yesterday brought exciting news on the ZFS and Ubuntu fronts—experimental ZFS root support in the installer for Ubuntu's upcoming interim release, Eoan Ermine. The feature appeared in the 2019-10-09 daily build of Eoan—it's not in the regular beta release, and in fact wasn't even in the "current daily" when we first went to download it. It's that new! (Readers wanting to play with the new functionality can find it in today's daily build, available here.)

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  Time to install the 2019-10-09 daily build of Eoan Ermine on a fresh new VM! [credit: Jim Salter ]

For the ZFS newbies

If you're new to the ZFS hype train, you might wonder why a new filesystem option in an OS installer is a big deal. So here's a quick explanation: ZFS is a copy-on-write filesystem, which can take atomic snapshots of entire filesystems. This looks like sheer magic if you're not used to it—a snapshot of a 10TB filesystem can be taken instantly without interrupting any system process in the slightest. Once the snapshot is taken, it's an immutable record of the exact, block-for-block condition of the filesystem at the moment in time the snapshot was taken.

When a snapshot is first taken, it consumes no additional disk space. As time goes by and changes are made to the filesystem, the space required to keep the snapshot grows by the amount of data that's been deleted or altered. So let's say you snapshot a 10TB filesystem: the snapshot completes instantly, requiring no additional room. Then you delete a 5MB JPEG file—now the snapshot consumes 5MB of disk space, because it still has the JPEG you deleted. Then you change 5MB of data in a database, and the snapshot takes 10MB—5MB for the JPEG you deleted and another 5MB for the data that you altered in the database.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty)

As one of the original versions of Unix, BSD is an ancient operating system. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it used what are, by today’s standards, strange, even ridiculous security. For one, the hashing function protecting passwords, though state of the art 40 years ago, is now trivial to crack. Stranger still, the password hashes of some BSD creators were included in publicly available source code. And then, there are the passwords people chose.

Last week, technologist Leah Neukirchen reported finding a source tree for BSD version 3, circa 1980, and successfully cracking passwords of many of computing’s early pioneers. In most of the cases the success was the result of the users choosing easy-to-guess passwords.

BSD co-inventor Dennis Ritchie, for instance, used “dmac” (his middle name was MacAlistair); Stephen R. Bourne, creator of the Bourne shell command line interpreter, chose “bourne”; Eric Schmidt, an early developer of Unix software and now the executive chairman of Google parent company Alphabet, relied on “wendy!!!” (the name of his wife); and Stuart Feldman, author of Unix automation tool make and the first Fortran compiler, used “axolotl” (the name of a Mexican salamander).