Technology Blog Dietmar Zlabinger

Abstract Syntax Notation 1 (ASN1) is probably one of the worst encodings the Internet community has seen. Unfortunately this encoding is a key component in Internet security. Peter Gutmann, professor at the University of Auckland, NZ has not just written “How Not to Design a Crypto Protocol/Standard“, but also an ASN1-dump C-program.  I added a Java-script port written by Lapo Luchini to my homepage under http://www.zlabinger.at/asn1dump.

This version uses the top certificate of the TKK as an example.

In a test-setup I put 561GByte of data onto a 1 TByte harddisk. The first disk is formated with ext3, the other with xfs.
Here are the results:

df -h
/dev/sdc1 932G 561G 372G 61% /media/disk1_1T
/dev/sdd1 917G 561G 311G 65% /media/disk2_1T
mount
/dev/sdc1 on /media/disk1_1T type xfs (rw)
/dev/sdd1 on /media/disk2_1T type ext4 (rw)


Ok, by default ext reserves 5% for root-only usage, after removing that reservation ext4 ist still behind xfs:

tune2fs -m0 /dev/sdd1
Setting reserved blocks percentage to 0% (0 blocks)

df
/dev/sdc1 932G 561G 372G 61% /media/hd51_1T
/dev/sdd1 917G 561G 357G 62% /media/hd53_1T


Conclusion: ext3 reserves 15GByte more administrative space.
Of course, it’s not all about efficiency.