Hi everyone! 👋
Welcome to cron.weekly issue #155.
Last week the cat co-wrote the issue, this time I’m joined by a frog. These truly are weird times we’re living in.
A quick heads-up: next week I’m taking a newsletter break, I’ll be back in your inbox on November 15th.
Happy ☕️ time!
News & general 🗞
The story behind youtube-dl
Popular open-source tool youtube-dl got removed from GitHub after a DCMA notice. Right now, the youtube-dl GitHub repo is unavailable. The GitLab version is still up though.
There’s lots of backlash, including from journalists who rely on youtube-dl when reporting on extremist/controversial content.
Github’s CEO tried to reach out to the maintainers over IRC to help resolve the issue.
As people are quickly learning, you don’t necessarily need GitHub to host the code, it can be embedded in images, tweeted out, and extracted again to get all the source code.
For those interested, the full DCMA letter can be found in GitHub’s DMCA repo.
Preparing for the Docker Hub Rate Limits
On Nov 1st, all images pulled from the Docker Hub will be subjected to severe limits, which will affect all Kubernetes users. Learn what solutions exist, and how how to prepare.
Tools & Projects 🛠
Fedora 33
A new major release of the Fedora project. This’ll form the basis of a RHEL/CentOS distribution some day, so if you want to be bleeding edge - you can start running Fedora today.
Visualize the health of all your servers in one place
Understand your entire environment and monitor Linux servers in real-time with Datadog. Discover underutilized cloud and on-prem servers using the auto-generated host map and reduce excess capacity based on historical data so you can easily save on operational costs.
Start a free trial today, create one dashboard, and Datadog will send you a free t-shirt! Sponsored
mobilizon
Gather, organize and mobilize yourselves with a convivial, ethical, and emancipating tool.
Grafana Tempo
Tempo is an easy-to-operate, high-scale, and cost-effective distributed tracing system on top of Grafana. Tempo is designed to be a robust trace id lookup store whose only dependency is object storage (GCS/S3).
ESXi on Raspberry Pi
There’s now a version of VMware’s ESXi that you can run on a Raspberry Pi!
Smallstep - Single Sign On SSH. Zero key mgmt
Smallstep SSH delivers an end-to-end workflow that marries modern identity providers with short-lived SSH certificates. Eliminate TOFU warnings and drop complex key approval & distribution processes. Extend single sign-on to SSH and make SSH keys ephemeral.
Give it a try, it’s free. Sponsored
vdx
An intuitive CLI for processing video, powered by FFmpeg. You can crop, trim, resize, reverse, rotate, strip audio, change the speed, change the frame rate, change the volume, convert to a different file format etc.
pandoc
The swiss-army knife of converting files from one markup format into another. Pandoc can convert between Markdown, AsciiDoc, HTML, Epub, … just about everything.
composer 2.0
PHP’s package manager, composer, has a new major release out. It’s faster, uses less memory & is backwards compatible. You can easily update with composer self-update --2.
Guides & Tutorials 🎓
What’s in a Linux executable?
This post contains a very detailed and in-depth view at Linux executables, covering ELF (Executable and Linkable Format), assembly and how to parse those binaries to make sense of it all.
Which DNS are you using?
This is a very clever tool that tries to decipher which nameservers you’re currently using. It’s surprisingly accurate, with the source code & documentation on how it works available on GitHub.
Diving into /proc/pid/mem
A very low-level write-up on how to access and read the /proc/[pid]/mem file, which allows raw access to the virtual address space of a process.
Restrict access to your internal websites on AWS with BeyondCorp
Access control & authorization is a challenge for most organisations, this detailed write-up shows us one way of doing it. By using Google’s BeyondCorp, managed through Terraform.
Building containers without Docker
Another good reminder that you don’t need Docker to build containers, there’s plenty of tools & methods available to create OCI (Open Container Initiative )-compatible containers.
Jobs 📇
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