Dynamic Firewall View in Sentinel View v1.1.0

You may have read some of our previous articles about Turris Sentinel and it’s companion – Sentinel View. Today we would like to share yet another cool feature that is available and that gives you even better feel how dangerous the internet really is.

uCollect is dead, long live Turris Sentinel!

If you follow what we do, you might have noticed that we recently announced the end of Turris OS 3.X. It was first released in 2016 and it was with us for quite some time. But in the end we managed to debug the migration to Turris OS 5.x and migrated everybody over. But this blog post is not about that. This post is about deprecation one of the parts, that was replaced by a newer and better system – uCollect.

Sentinel View 1.0 Release

Highly anticipated release of Sentinel Viev have come to life. It wasn’t a breeze due to issues with time-expensive database queries. The upgrade was conducted in spirit of optimizing the ever-growing database. Although Martin Prudek, the author of major changes is not part of the team, his effort left everlasting mark on the project. Another former colleague, Vojta Myslivec, have been unforgettable helping hand in regard to the database end and it’s improvement.

BIRD Journey to Threads. Chapter 3½: Route server performance

All the work on multithreading shall be justified by performance improvements. This chapter tries to compare times reached by version 3.0-alpha0 and 2.0.8, showing some data and thinking about them.

BIRD is a fast, robust and memory-efficient routing daemon designed and implemented at the end of 20th century. We’re doing a significant amount of BIRD’s internal structure changes to make it run in multiple threads in parallel.

BIRD Journey to Threads. Chapter 3: Parallel execution and message passing.

Parallel execution in BIRD uses an underlying mechanism of dedicated IO loops and hierarchical locks. The original event scheduling module has been converted to do message passing in multithreaded environment. These mechanisms are crucial for understanding what happens inside BIRD and how its internal API changes.

BIRD is a fast, robust and memory-efficient routing daemon designed and implemented at the end of 20th century. We’re doing a significant amount of BIRD’s internal structure changes to make it run in multiple threads in parallel.

New Statistics – What’s under the Hood?

CZ.NIC has quite a long tradition of acquiring, processing and publishing data about the operation of authoritative DNS servers, public resolver ODVR, CZ domain register and mojeID service. Whilst previous (and still active) web pages with statistics offered many graphs and extensive options for setting their parameters, they tended to evoke the refrain from the popular Czech song by Zdeněk Svěrák and Jaroslav Uhlíř: “Statistics is boring, albeit having valuable data …”. One of very few positive outcomes of the covid pandemic was, thanks to the efforts of Johns Hopkins University and many other institutions, a considerably raised standard of statistical visualisations that our old statistics certainly don’t fulfil.

Survey results: DNS resolvers’ configuration

Contemporary DNS software is very complex. Vendors and development teams lack feedback about the features that are actually in use. Our survey aimed to obtain such information from users. The results are described in this article. Users and administrators of DNS resolvers from any vendor were invited to participate in this survey. This post follows the article “Survey: How do you configure DNS resolvers?”.