Welcome to _cron.weekly _issue #47 for Sunday, September 25th, 2016.
A bit later than usual, but I’m liking it better this way. From now on, cron.weekly is not going to have a fixed time for delivery. It’s still weekly and it’ll still be sent on Sunday, but it’s less formal from now on.
After all, it’s just a hobby and having a time constraint & deadline in the weekend is taking its toll on me. Having the ability to finish the newsletter later will give me more peace of mind.
So long 08:00 UTC+2, hello $RANDOM!
News#
OpenSSL Security Advisory [22 Sep 2016] #
A new high severity vulnerability has been patched in OpenSSL: a denial of service attack when using OCSP stapling.
The MIT license explained, line by line #
This is one of the most popular open source licenses, and it’s broken down line-by-line by a lawyer, in clear language (heck, even I understood it). The MIT license is pretty short, but there are a lot of nuances in those words that can make a difference.
Introducing the GitHub Load Balancer #
The GitHub team has introduced their custom load balancer setup which handles their HTTP/HTTPS/SSH traffic. A mix of layer4 (ECMP) and Layer7 (proxies) are used to handle all the requests. Looking forward to their follow-up posts!
What it costs to run Let’s Encrypt #
I like how they open up their finances too: a total yearly cost of 2.9M USD of which 2.0M USD goes to staffing.
Blurred Lines #
An interesting blogpost about what happens when you join the company behind an open source project you’ve been contributing to, what changes, who takes responsibility, …
Tools & Projects#
ripgrep #
A faster grep, beating the silver searcher, ack, egrep, … Quite a lot of benchmarks on this page proving the speed of ripgrep!
httpstat #
This one is going into my daily arsenal of HTTP tools: a wrapper around “curl -v” which offers a better view of the timings of a curl request. Nicely done! (make sure to check out the screenshot)
ClonOS #
ClonOS is a free open-source FreeBSD-based platform for virtual environments creation and management. In the core: Xen, Jails, Puppet, bhyve hypervisor & ZFS.
pgslice #
Postgres partitioning as easy as pie. Works great for both new and existing tables, with zero downtime and minimal app changes.
Deepstream #
This is a fast, secure and scalable websocket & tcp server for mobile, web & “internet of things”. Think if it like a socket.io/Firebase/Pusher pub/sub & messaging server you can self-host.
CouchDB 2.0 #
A new major release for the database engine: native support for clustering, new admin interface, easier queries & improved performance.
Shipyard #
Built on Docker Swarm, Shipyard gives you the ability to manage Docker resources including containers, images, private registries and more.
Vossibility-stack #
Vossibility provides better visibility for your open source project. It can collect data from GitHub and visualise them, like commits, issues reported/solved, … In short, a fun dashboard for your OSS project.
TLSlayer #
TLSlayer is a FAST TLS/SSL reconnaisance tool written in Go. The primary aim is to provide a tool that has no dependencies on OpenSSL that can utilize multiple cores.
VCLFiddle #
A fun web interface to play around with the Varnish VCL configs, without having to spin up your own instances.
Guides & Tutorials#
You probably want to start using the -w option with iptables #
Did you know iptables can be locked? If that’s the case, commands you send to iptables will happily be ignored. The -w option prevents that from happening. This post is a good write-up on where that might sting you.
Upgrade your SSH keys to ed25519 #
A good post with practical tips on using more secure ciphers for your SSH keys by moving to an ed25519 key.
Using Ansible’s command and shell modules properly #
This post offers some good tips (at least for beginner Ansible users) on when to use the command and the shell options.
Videos#
How not to measure latency #
I liked this talk about common pitfalls when monitoring latency, or just monitoring in general. Offers some good and practical points on improving your metrics and drawing better conclusions.
#
Conferences#
LinuxDays Prague #
On the 8th and 9th October 2016 in Prague, Czech. Quite the schedule if you happen to be around!
ContainerDays NYC #
A different continent, ContainerDays is happening in New York on November 3-4. And if you’re looking for a discount, use promocode “CRON.TAINERDAYS”. That’s right, the first cron.weekly reader perk!