
/dev/null as a Service - dewey
http://devnull-as-a-service.com/
======
jnbiche
Best nginx config ever?

    
    
      location /dev/null {
          if ($request_method = POST ) {
            return 200; 
          }
      }

~~~
elwell
"200" makes sense. See wikipedia article on /dev/null[0]: "discards all data
written to it but reports that the write operation succeeded."

[0] -
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki//dev/null](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki//dev/null)

~~~
einhverfr
wouldn't 202 be better?

~~~
nine_k
_204 No Content_ would.

 _202_ assumes a possibility of further processing, but /dev/null can offer
none.

~~~
einhverfr
True, but that still mirrors the successful wrote responses in the UNIX file
system, right?

------
wulczer
Reminds me of
[http://www.supersimplestorageservice.com/](http://www.supersimplestorageservice.com/)

~~~
rjgray
I especially love that the web proxies at my place of employment block this
site as "Online Storage"

~~~
fallingmeat
haha, yeah here too

------
elwell
IP address is owned by NSA Fort Meade office. Possible honeypot scheme? I
can't think of any other reason it would have that attractive free tier.

~~~
Chupachupski
You're teasing, right?

dig devnull-as-a-service.com

; ANSWER SECTION: devnull-as-a-service.com. 1481 IN A 213.95.21.200

[http://whois.domaintools.com/213.95.21.200](http://whois.domaintools.com/213.95.21.200)

Whois Server: whois.psi-usa.info ASN: Germany AS12337 NORIS-NETWORK noris
network AG (registered Mar 22, 1999) IP Location: Germany - Bayern - Nuremberg
- Noris Network Ag Domain Status: Registered And Active Website

~~~
nwh
A reverse lookup shows that the server is also hosting
[https://coffeestats.org/](https://coffeestats.org/) \- clearly there's
someone here trying to collect vast amounts of data about the general public.
I don't think the parents fears are unwarranted, the fact that it's hosted in
a German IP block could be to throw people off the trail.

~~~
jeza
Seems like a genuine joke to me. This is the guy behind it:
[http://noqqe.de](http://noqqe.de)

"About Florian Baumann (24). Arbeite bei der GfK SE und interessiere mich für
allerhand Dinge unter anderem Debian, BSD, OpenSource, R, Statistik,
Scripting, Hacks, Administration.

Was das alles so mit sich bringt schreibe ich manchmal hier auf. Manchmal
nicht. Außerdem sammle ich hier ohne Sinn und Schema Zeug das ich nie wieder
brauche."

~~~
nwh
Don't fret — I was joking too.

------
TrainedMonkey
At least these guys are honest: We know that everyone cares about thier
privacy these days. We promise we won't let anyone have a look at your
data[1].

[1] Anyone excluding the following companies and de­part­ments. Just the good
guys, you know?: NSA, Nestle, Communist Party of China (CPC), The Coca-Cola
Company, the KGB, some of your coworkers and our friends (especially if there
is something funny).

~~~
TrainedMonkey
This is actually implying that one of the listed entities is a department
within company that produced this marvelous software. I wonder which.

------
korvkorvkorv
You guys and your fancy HTTP services. Discard should be enough for everyone.
[http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc863](http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc863)

~~~
timv
Discard is fundamentally flawed. Because the service does not provide a
response the client cannot reliably determine whether the data was
successfully discarded.

Without a response there's the possibility that your data could be lost on its
way to being thrown away, and you'd never know.

------
snorkel
/dev/null is way too polite. For my services I much prefer to rely on the
[http://foaas.com/](http://foaas.com/) API

~~~
Schwolop
Awesome. I thought "this is exactly the kind of thing my former colleagues
would find hilarious". Then I scrolled down.

They wrote it.

------
rcfox
I'd be wary of using this. There's no mention of their data retention policy.

~~~
Aldo_MX

      Privacy
      
      We know that everyone cares about thier privacy these days. We promise we won't let
      anyone have a look at your data[1].
      
      [1] Anyone excluding the following companies and de­part­ments. Just the good guys,
      you know?: NSA, Nestle, Communist Party of China (CPC),
      The Coca-Cola Company, the KGB, some of your coworkers and our friends
      (especially if there is something funny).
    

[http://devnull-as-a-service.com/features/](http://devnull-as-a-
service.com/features/)

------
alpeb
What's up with HN today? Lots of reddit-style garbage in the front page.

~~~
chid
Maybe get enough karma to downvote?

~~~
error54
You can't down vote submissions.

------
ryan-allen
The website is missing a "meet the founders" page with the pre-pubescent CEO,
CTO, Director of Marketing and Director of Customer Excellent, who just
happens to be the CTO's little sister.

~~~
gotrecruit
how do you know?

------
comice
If they've not configured nginx carefully, it will be buffering request bodies
to temporary files on disk.

So your data might not really be going to /dev/null - it might be going to a
disk. Most likely not want you want at all.

I'll get a CVE allocated for this bug right away.

------
mwetzler
Don't be fooled by this clever marketing for a scam service! Keen IO is the
true market leader in /dev/null as a service! We released in April 2013 and
have been serving customers with a 100% satisfaction rating ever since. See
"Keen IO releases API for /dev/null" to get the full story and perspectives
from industry experts on this robust REST API. Keen IO: /dev/null for modern
developers.

[https://keen.io/blog/46856249197/keen-io-releases-api-for-
de...](https://keen.io/blog/46856249197/keen-io-releases-api-for-dev-null)

------
anonymous
Probably the site is under load, but I loved that when I clicked on
"features", I got back an Error 500 - Internal Server Error.

~~~
jlgreco
They only guarantee 85.66% uptime. They need to sleep too!

------
gwu78
One reason I am not a devfs fan is because I'm a mknod(1) user. For example,
FreeBSD has one of those famous "_________ is deprecated" bold warnings
regarding mknod.

It is not deprecated in my usage. I use it all the time.

I do not rely on /dev/null.

I make my own null character devices as I need them.

~~~
derleth
> I do not rely on /dev/null.

> I make my own null character devices as I need them.

Why? Is there ever a reason to have more than one file on your system which
acts as a /dev/null?

~~~
gwu78
"Why?" Why not?

In my case, the reason is because it's shorter to type.

I would expect most longtime UNIX users have experienced what happens when,
for one reason or another, /dev/null is not a null character device and you
have scripts or programs writing to it as if it was. By the time you realize
that this has happened, it's too late -- data has already been saved to this
file.

There may be various workarounds for this. I'm not a professional sysadmin.

But in my case, for my own personal usage systems, by using my own null
character device in my own tmpfs mounted folders, I can just test for the
success/failure of the mknod command before I start redirecting anything to
it.

I don't need a /dev/null. But I do need mknod.

~~~
anyfoo
And you need to be root, apparently.

~~~
gwu78

      setuidgid luser mknod ...
    

Are you sure?

~~~
anyfoo
Great. You just gave luser _at least_ read access to a whole lot of your
hardware, including your whole hard disks, swap space, and some device nodes
which potentially crash the system upon random reading.

~~~
gwu78
My system has only one user: me. I am the only one using it.

Multiuser UNIX is a relic from a long past era of shared computing. The "root"
concept creates more security issues than it solves. That's why Plan 9 did
away with it.

------
alexchamberlain
I'm guessing this is a parody?

~~~
chops
I'm guessing it's inspired by the video "MongoDB is Web Scale"

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs)

~~~
aroman
Wow I can't believe that video has gone viral — I remember showing it around
to a few friends 2 years ago or so when it only had a few thousand views.
Ironically, MongoDB has since become my go-to DB of choice...

~~~
kansface
Have you read [http://aphyr.com/posts/284-call-me-maybe-
mongodb](http://aphyr.com/posts/284-call-me-maybe-mongodb) ?

------
venantius
Pity devnull.io was already taken.

------
shenoybr
They had me at "Use our dis­tri­bu­ted service located in over 380 countries!"

~~~
anonymoushn
I'd like to visit their backup Earth :)

------
korethr
Wow, is it April already?

Do you suppose after they successfully implement /dev/random as a service,
they might implement /dev/zero or /dev/full next? Or /dev/console might be
especially useful.

~~~
bitops
I've already launched a competitive /dev/urandom service!

~~~
reinhardt
You jest but...
[http://www.random.org/clients/http/](http://www.random.org/clients/http/)

------
pouzy
If you don't let Google read my data, I'm ready for the 5k/y

------
Walkman
I wonder if it would be possible to sell a service like this for real. I bet
it would.

------
whalesalad
I get the feeling that the fact that the site never loads for me is
intentional?

------
dhruvbird
"85,66% guaranteed uptime (we need some sleep, too)" lol!!!

------
drnex
This is trash, literally and figuratively.

------
bluesmoon
leet timestamp on the HTML: 27.10.2013, 13:37

~~~
noqqe
;)

[https://github.com/noqqe/devnull-as-a-
service/commit/a305550...](https://github.com/noqqe/devnull-as-a-
service/commit/a305550d5c234834ec74c165e394d03be38f69fe)

------
FrankenPC
I laughed at high availability /dev/null cluster.

------
Artemis2
I've always dreamt of that!

------
runnr_az
that's very silly.

------
dschiptsov
This must be at least few hundred millions of lines of _Java_ code (to be able
to access /dev/null in a portable way).

------
paxcoder
CC-NC epic fail

