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Openrsync: An implementation of rsync, by the OpenBSD team

120 pointsby sphtoday at 10:51 AM49 commentsview on HN

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denysvitalitoday at 3:12 PM

There's also a Go implementation by Michael Stapelberg / the Gokrazy team: https://github.com/gokrazy/rsync

Bendertoday at 1:48 PM

The actual work of porting is matching the security features provided by OpenBSD's pledge(2) and unveil(2). These are critical elements to the functionality of the system. Without them, your system accepts arbitrary data from the public network.

https://justine.lol/pledge/

I am not seeing pledge on Alpine Linux in edge. Have people been testing Pledge on Linux? Did I perhaps misunderstand the risk of using Openrsync without pledge? Or is this article just for OpenBSD users?

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tptacektoday at 2:11 PM

rsync has specific running modes for the super-user. It also pumps arbitrary data from the network onto your file-system. openrsync is about 10 000 lines of C code: do you trust me not to make mistakes?

No, but that's why almost nobody runs it outside of strict trust boundaries. This security section would make more sense if rsync was like curl, which routinely deals with hostile counterparties. If the other side of your rsync is hostile, you probably have bigger problems!

(I'm not an rpki person so I don't know if there's some part of that problem domain that changes this equation. I'm not dunking on the project, just saying this snagged me in the README).

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triggistoday at 12:21 PM

No-slop version for the sane of us

Context: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@JeremiahFieldhaven/116654345...

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jmclnxtoday at 12:59 PM

I have not checked with OpenBSD 7.9, but as of 7.8 it did not support --exclude or -z. But outside of that openrsync works great.

(EDIT: --exclude is now supported on 7.9. Not sure when that was added, nice!)

But seems avoiding "slop" is getting very hard. I saw postfix now has a bit of AI code in it.

https://mastodon.sdf.org/@[email protected]/1...

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skeledrewtoday at 1:16 PM

This attempt to avoid things that use AI is increasingly looking like some weird kind of reverse whack-a-mole where each targeted hole becomes radioactive after. Just grabbing some popcorn to watch.

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WD-42today at 1:21 PM

What's the deal with the name? Openrsync implies to me that it's an open source alternative to a closed source program. But the original Rsync is GPL? Is this just the pushover license making it "more open"?

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