Comments for jv's blog

Comment on BrowserID outage last week by Unihost Brasil

Unihost Brasil — Thu, 17 May 2012 23:11:34 +0000

Thanks for the transparency. We had reports from some customers about this problem and we pointed out this post.

Alex @ Unihost Brasil

Comment on Help Mozilla Services Operations debug what’s wrong with Sync by Bruce Schadel

Bruce Schadel — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 02:48:11 +0000

Did the pastebin again but twitter is not working tonight. Still get “Incorrect account name or password” error even though changes made on my other PC propagate to this one. Have tried everything short of buying a new PC.

Comment on The Sync Platform Meltdown, Explained by Eric

Eric — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 04:27:41 +0000

i did everything is checked in sync and i’ve uninstalled it i posted it on http://mozservices.pastebin.mozilla.org/1371426 to see if you can see what the problem is jv

Comment on The Sync Platform Meltdown, Explained by jv

jv — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 18:33:58 +0000

Anonymous — If your devices are actively Syncing, this should basically be a non-issue. 5000 unique URLs is quite a lot, and your local Firefox will keep whatever length of History you choose regardless of what it receives from Sync. The only “loss” of older History is when adding a new device to your Sync account you’ll only get the most recent data. If this is a concern, you could migrate that History data manually as described in the links I sent previously.

The reason the TTL for History data is 60 days is basically simplicity in the server as well as in the database pruning algorithm. 60 days TTL accommodates the average user’s browsing patterns with room to spare.

Comment on The Sync Platform Meltdown, Explained by Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 18:22:32 +0000

@jv: Thanks for the clarifications. Does any means exist to get other devices to retrieve more than 5000 entries of history? Also, why does the server delete records after 60 days rather than deleting them based on the number of entries? Older history remains useful.

Comment on The Sync Platform Meltdown, Explained by jv

jv — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 18:00:35 +0000

Eric — check your Preferences -> Sync selections to make sure all your desired collections are checked. We have seen a bug where something triggers Firefox to de-select some options…

Comment on The Sync Platform Meltdown, Explained by jv

jv — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 17:54:49 +0000

Anonymous -- Let's first be clear -- Sync does not "back up" anything. Sync exists to synchronize your data across multiple devices. That it can act as a back up is not its intended job, and depending on it as a back up system is asking for heartbreak. You should be backing your profile -- instructions for backing up and another article that might be useful. Regardless, here is how Sync deals with History. First, each History record is encrypted separately (not into a bundle like tabs). When the Sync client (in Firefox) connects, it uploads the changed data of the last 30 days of History (again, in encrypted records) and the *server* marks when they were uploaded and flags them for deletion after 60 days. Since the records use unique keys based on a hash of the visited URL, records are updated if they've been modified (again, the updated data is *also* encrypted, so Mozilla has no idea *what* is being updated or what the update contains). When another device connects, it only downloads the most recent 5000 History entries using the server-side time-stamps on data records (meaning no identifiable data is visible on Mozilla's end).

Comment on The Sync Platform Meltdown, Explained by Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 07:44:16 +0000

You mentioned that the server only tracks the 5000 most recent history items. Does that just represent what Firefox syncs immediately, or does Firefox *never* attempt to sync data any older than that? The latter situation would concern me; I’d like to have *all* of my history backed up, not just the 5000 most recent items. Quite often I dig up sites I haven’t visited in a long time, and the awesomebar does a good job of digging them up for me.

Related to that, given the client-side encryption, what information did you have to tell you which history entries to prune, for your original plan of selectively pruning server-side? Does some kind of sequence number exist for history entries? (I would hope that no date information exists; even the timestamps on history entries expose private information, namely that the user browsed the web at that time.)

Comment on The Sync Platform Meltdown, Explained by Taking a break from Firefox Sync « philiKON – a journal

Taking a break from Firefox Sync « philiKON – a journal — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 04:23:22 +0000

[...] trains ensure a tight and timely engineering/QA/deployment cycle. And while we’ve hit some bumps along the road, it feels like we’re doing proper software development and stuff. More importantly it feels [...]

Comment on The Sync Platform Meltdown, Explained by Eric

Eric — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 07:54:46 +0000

just wondering on how long until the sync is fixed all i get is just bookmarks. My passwords and preferences don’t get synced