Welcome to _cron.weekly _issue #48 for Sunday, October 2nd, 2016.
Lots of variation again that should keep you busy on your Sunday!
I’m also in the process of moving the e-mail list to something self-hosted, so keep an eye out on your spamfilter the next few weeks if you’re not receiving your Sunday dose of Linux & open source news.
News
PostgreSQL 9.6 released
This new release supports parallelizing some query operations over multiple cores, improved text search, improved back-ups and lots of smaller improvements. At the same time, Barman 2.0 has been released (the PostgreSQL back-up and recovery manager).
How to crash systemd in one tweet
Not the best week for systemd: a single command, run by an unpriviliged user, can “crash” systemd. All processes will keep running, but you can no longer start/stop any services. Rebooting won’t work either, as that’s handled by systemd. You’re left resetting/power cycling your server.
Decommissioning Otto
I missed this a few weeks ago: HashiCorp announced Otto as the successor to Vagrant last year, but it seems the project got cancelled. You just can’t replace Vagrant.
Let ‘localhost’ be localhost
This is a proposal to make everything in the *.localhost domain resolve to localhost, without having to explicitly specify it in DNS/hosts file. So for testing, “project1.localhost” could automatically point to 127.0.0.1 or ::1.
Kubernetes 1.4 released
This new release adds much easier joining/creation of clusters via the ‘kubeadm’ CLI tool, simpler installation using apt/yum and a discovery API you could use to implement service discovery.
Security things in Linux v4.3
A good overview of several security measures that were introduced since kernel 4.3; lots of details on random memory mappings & better capability passing when processes are forked.
New OpenSSL security announce
As it turns out, the fixes for a Denial of Service in OpenSSL that were released last week introduced a Remote Code Execution vulnerability. So this set of OpenSSL patches fixes those problems. Time to update, again.
Linux kernel security needs a rethink
A pretty good thought piece on how the Linux kernel should adapt to ever growing threats.
Tools & Projects
armor
A new webserver written in Go which offers HTTP/2 and automatic TLS based on Let’s Encrypt. This looks to be very similar to Caddy in terms of goals and setup.
UpscaleDB MySQL storage engine
UpscaleDB is a nosql key/value store, but this project introduces UpscaleDB as a MySQL storage engine compatible with InnoDB. In other words, you could remove the InnoDB engine from MySQL and replace it with this one, and it *should* run faster.
Mailcow
mailcow is a mail server suite based on Dovecot, Postfix and other open source software, that provides a modern Web UI for administration.
Guides & Tutorials
Kubernetes 101
Plenty of graphs and explanation to give an overview of Kubernetes, the layers (etcd, API, controller, scheduler, …), the control plane, how nodes work, …
The Docker monitoring problem
Monitoring Docker isn’t that easy, as containers can come and go when needed. It introduces a couple of methods to handle this, mainly by not treating containers as “hosts” to individually monitor, but by looking at the overal architecture.
Debugging PostgreSQL performance, the hard way
This post tells a tale how the author went about troubleshooting a PostgreSQL installation that was consuming more and more CPU steadily. Some good ideas if you ever need to troubleshoot PostgreSQL!
How to use SSH keys for Authentication (for beginners)
If you’re new to Linux or SSH, this is a good post describing how public & private keypairs work for SSH authentication.
Conferences
Config Management Camp Berlin
This single day event takes place in Berlin on November 15th. If it’s anything like the Config Management Camps in Ghent, Belgium, it’s a must-attend!