Hi everyone! 👋
Welcome to cron.weekly issue #140.
In next week’s issue I want to include a jobs section. If you’re thinking about looking for a new challenge, you might just find what you’re looking for there! Only the cool companies get listed, of course. 😎
If you’re looking for new talent and want to get featured in that list, hit reply and let me know! Deadline is Thursday, July 2nd. 💪
In this issue, there’s a new section called Request for Comments (a different kind of RFC), with projects and issues that could use an extra set of eyes. Check them out!
Take care! ☕️
News & general 🗞
The WWDC section 🤓
Apple had its developer conference called WWDC last week, here’s what stood out to me for other webdevs/sysadmins:
For web developers:
- The new Safari will not block Google Analytics, just reduce some if its cross-site tracking capabilities. I got this wrong.
- Safari will now support the WebP image format, making it the last browser after Chrome, Firefox & Edge to do so. But, maybe the WebP image format isn’t worth it?
- Safari will also have experimental support for HTTP/3. Disabled by default, but at least the basics are there.
- Safari will completely remove the ability to run Flash.
For sysadmins:
- The new ARM-based laptops will have a Secure Boot feature that, by default, prevents any other OS from booting. While they won’t officially support it, by disabling Secure Boot you should be able to run Linux or Windows as well.
- They’re developing a new x86_64 to ARM translation layer called Rosetta 2.
- Mac & iOS will support both DNS-over-TLS (DoT) and DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH).
- Mac will require extra permissions to modify the certificate trust settings, so if you deploy your own CA to Macs, pay special attention.
- To help the transition to ARM, Apple will dedicated resources to submit patches to popular open-source projects. This could be good news for a wider ARM-on-the-server adoption.
Announcing Perl 7
Work on Perl 7 is already underway, but it’s not going to be a huge change in code or syntax. It’s Perl 5 with modern defaults and it sets the stage for bigger changes later.
Perl 7.0 is going to be v5.32 but with different, saner, more modern defaults. You won’t have to enable most of the things you are already doing because they are enabled for you. The major version jump sets the boundary between how we have been doing things and what we can do in the future.
I’m not very active in the Perl world, but from the outside, it strikes me as odd that Perl 7 will be based on Perl 5, leaving Perl 6 as-is? I’m sure they know what they’re doing. 😄
(I shouldn’t mock too much, my beloved PHP did all sorts of funky things with PHP 6).
Chromium & Mozilla to enforce 1yr validity for certificates issued after 09/2020
Safari was first to introduce this new rule that limits the lifetime of new SSL certificates issued after September 1st, 2020. From then on, a publicly trusted certificate can only be valid for 1 year.
Enforce publicly trusted TLS server certificates have a lifetime of 398 days or less, if they are issued on or after 2020-09-01.
Certificates that violate this will be rejected with ERR_CERT_VALIDITY_TOO_LONG and will be treated as misissued.
Naturally, Oh Dear will notify you if it spots such certificates.
I Just Hit $100k/yr On GitHub Sponsors!
Well I didn’t, unfortunately (although you can sponsor me on Github wink-wink).
Caleb shares his success story of reaching $100k/yr to work on open-source projects like Laravel Livewire and AlpineJS. In this post, he shares his Sponsorware approach and the road to reaching that $100k/yr goal!
Supporting the Open Technology Fund
There is growing concern the US congress might dismantle the Open Technology Fund (OTF) in favor of closed-source applications. The website holds a lot of backstory, why it’s so important to keep the OTF and a petition to sign!
WireGuard gets merged into OpenBSD
WireGuard has been merged into the OpenBSD kernel, with a high change it’ll ship as part of OpenBSD 6.8.
Tools & Projects 🛠
Parsica
Parsica is a new way to build a robust parser in PHP. It lets you compose parsers from other parsers, using simple combinator functions. Start from small building blocks to parse strings, file formats, or entire languages - all in a readable, fluent syntax.
HetrixTools - Free Uptime Monitoring
Monitor your websites and servers every minute from around the world, and receive alerts as soon as any issues are detected, helping you minimize your downtime by being the first to know about it.
Start off with 15 Uptime Monitors, checked every 1 minute, completely free forever! Sponsored
aviary.sh
A minimal distributed configuration management in bash. Tiny alternative to ansible / chef / puppet / etc. Each host periodically fetches the latest version of the inventory to see what roles it should be performing.
MariaDB 10.5
With the release of MariaDB 10.5.4, it’s now the first stable release in the MariaDB 10.5 series. It has support for the INET6 datatype (to store IPv6 addresses), a new S3 storage engine, an improved query optimizer & plenty more.
Sysinternals ProcDump for Linux
Sysinternals are very widely used tools from Microsoft in the Windows world, and now the ProcDump utility has been ported over to Linux as an Open Source project from Microsoft. ProcDump is a command-line (CLI) utility for monitoring an application for CPU spikes and generates crash dumps during the spike.
nginx-ui
Nginx UI allows you to access and modify the nginx configurations files without cli.
Ploi.io - Server Management Tool
Server management at its finest, Ploi makes deploying your application to your own server a piece of cake. Server monitoring, Cloudflare DNS management, database backups, API, we’ve got your back when it comes to managing your server.
Easy 1-click installers for WordPress, OctoberCMS & Nextcloud. Sponsored
flatseal
Flatseal is a graphical utility to review and modify basic permissions from your Flatpak applications.
btfs
A bittorrent filesystem based on FUSE. With BTFS, you can mount any .torrent file or magnet link and then use it as any read-only directory in your file tree. The contents of the files will be downloaded on-demand as they are read by applications. Tools like ls, cat and cp works as expected.
Guides & Tutorials 🎓
What happens when you update your DNS?
Why are DNS changes so slow? Does it really take 2 days of waiting for everything to be updated? Why do some people see the new IP and some people see the old IP? What’s happening?
Saving Cloud Costs with Kubernetes on AWS
This post will covers cleaning up unused resources (kube-janitor), scaling down during non-work hours (kube-downscaler), using horizontal autoscaling (HPA) &reducing resource slack (kube-resource-report, VPA).
Put your bash code in functions
I didn’t know you could easily run Bash functions in parallel with the & symbol, so this is indeed a good use case to break up Bash scripts into multiple functions which you could run side-by-side!
Where did my disk space go?
Who hasn’t spent some time hunting down where the free disk space has suddenly gone to? This post covers much of the standard things to look for!
Videos 👀
Here are some interesting videos I came across in the recent weeks, a good dev/ops mix.
If you have any other recommendations, please send them my way.
Request for Comments 💡
In this new section I want to highlight several issues/pull-requests/discussions that could use an extra set of eyes. Want to help contribute?
(This is the first try at this new section, if it’s successful I’ll keep including it. For that to work, please send me issues/PRs you’d like to highlight!)
- PHP 8.0
RC1alpha1 is available for testing, plenty of proposals have already been included, but there’s a lot more still under discussion. Want to help shape the next few years of PHP? Get involved! - You can help nominate authors for the 2020 “state of the web” report by the HTTP Archive on topics like CSS, JavaScript, Performance, Security, Caching, …
- What should be the correct way to handle MySQL timeouts or supervisor restart issues in Symfony?
- How should the laravel-translatable package handle fallbacks?
- The new Linux 5.8-rc1 looks to be one of the biggest releases of all time with “about 20% of all the files in the kernel source repository that have been changed”. Sounds to me they can use extra testers!
- The next release of Prometheus (Prometheus 2.20 - scheduled for mid July) has two new service discovery mechanisms: Docker Swarm and DigitalOcean. Community feedback is appreciated before the release!