Hi everyone! 👋
Welcome to cron.weekly issue #147.
I feel recharged and ready for another round of Linux, php & open-source news!
Hope you’ll like this issue.
Find yourself a warm cup of ☕️, take a seat and happy reading.
News & general 🗞
Redis Labs Raises $100 Million
Redis Labs, the company behind Redis, one o fthe most popular open source database and the provider of Redis Enterprise, today announced it has closed $100 million in Series F financing at a company valuation of more than $1 billion.
Safari gets extension compatibility with Chrome, Firefox
By using the same WebExtensions API used in other browsers, such as Chrome, Firefox, and Edge, Safari instantly gets access to the wide range of existing browser extensions.
Docker Hub to rate limit container pulls
Starting November 1st, 2020, Docker Hub will start rate limiting the amount of times a container can be pulled/downloaded per hour. If you’re heavily relying on a free Docker Hub account, this might bite you.
Tools & Projects 🛠
firewalld-rest
A novel approach: a REST API on your service you can talk to that allows you to add/remove IPs from a whitelist. I see some security concerns, but it’s a novel new take on the port-knocking idea.
Portmaster AMA - We want your feedback
As a company we believe in listening to our users, creating products that actually give you the tools you need to protect you and your family. Get to know the team during their AMA over at r/PrivacytoolsIO starting on the 18th of September. Sponsored
bottlerocket-os
An operating system designed for hosting containers, created by AWS.
htop 3.0
After a prolonged period of inactivity, new devs have taken over to support htop. The new 3.0 release features lots of improvements, mostly to underlying low-level items.
HEY.com - Email at its best, new from Basecamp
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webify
This is pretty clever! webify starts a web service that pipes any input straight to a binary of your choice. webify invokes your script and writes the request body to your process’ stdin. Stdout is then passed back to the client as the HTTP response body.
MyPaas
MyPaas is a tool that makes it easy to run a platform as a service (PaaS) on your own VM or hardware. It combines Traefik and Docker, offers free automatic https, secure deployments via dockerfiles, and analytics.
Guides & Tutorials 🎓
Understanding Daemons
A good primer on what services/daemons are, how they’re implemented and how “forking” works exactly. Lots of C-code examples, too.
The UNIX who command
A peak under the hood of the who command: where does it get its data from?
What Shell Am I Using?
A surprising rabbit-hole (with the basics of Linux troubleshooting tooling) to finding out what shell you’re running. I mean really know what shell you’re running.
Don’t trust default timeouts
“Modern applications don’t crash; they hang." I’ve long felt that soft failures, like timeouts, are much worse to debug and fix that hard failures - crashes, segfaults, exceptions. At least the latter gives you clear indications where the problem lies.
Things you didn’t know you could diff in GitHub
If GitHub is your daily driver or you’ve contributed to open source at some point, you’ve probably seen the comparison screen before. You can compare a lot in there, but most of it isn’t available in the UI. Here are a few tricks you probably didn’t know about.
Understanding DNS—anatomy of a BIND zone file
If you want to be a sysadmin or network administrator of any kind, there’s a fundamental technology you really need to understand: DNS, the Domain Name System.
How to take back control of /etc/resolv.conf on Linux
There are a number of programs that wants to automatically manage and handle the DNS name server and resolution configuration file at /etc/resolv.conf. In some situations you may want to manage this file yourself.
How NAT traversal works
How we can get through NATs (Network Address Translators) and connect devices directly to each other, no matter what’s standing between them? This is a clear and well-written deep dive into NAT traversal.
Jobs 📇
I received very good feedback on this job section, so it’s here to stay! Maybe you’re looking to start working closer to home, to reduce your commute? Or want to work with exciting new technology? Have a look at the companies below.
If you want to advertise your job opening here, have a look at the sponsorship section on the website and get in touch.
IT System Admin at WebSupport
Do you want to be in charge of one of the largest infrastructures in CEE? Join us in developing online world. Working as an IT System Administrator will deepen your knowledge of OS Linux, architecture of large solutions and administration of systems that host over 160.000 domains.
Location: Bratislava, Prague
Technical campaigner at WeMove.EU
You’ll work on the software (mostly open-source) and server operation for our online campaigning activities towards a Europe that puts people and the planet first. The stack includes Ruby, Python, PHP, Javascript, SQL, Docker, Ansible and you will interact with humans.
Location: Anywhere in the EU