[Box Backup] Box Backup on Rails - Part 2

[Stefan Norlin]

I just re-visited the webbased application we put together a short while 
ago.

The application felt very slow. The reason for this we discovered was the
ruby crypt library is a pure ruby implementation and therefore really slow. 
Also
the "ezcrypt" libraries available which are a wrapper towards the OpenSSL 
API
cannot be used since the "openssl" layer placed on top of the "raw" crypt
routines imposes a lot of restrictions on key length etc and therefore 
cannot
be used.

Our solution was to create a small ".so" file which wraps the AES and 
Blowfish
functions to be directly accessed from Ruby. This improved performance
more than 100 times. If the ".so" file is not available it will fallback to 
the
slow pure Ruby crypt library.

Also, now files can be downloaded in the application interface. Only one
file at a time can be downloaded currently. The file will be extracted on 
the
web server and then be re-compressed using "zip" when sent to the client.

https://secure2.infoflex.se/rbbackup/

"admin"/"bbadmin" - Admin account
"demo"/"bbdemo" - User account

Regards,
Stefan