cron.weekly issue #81: Nginx, Badger, fsql, zetcd, MySQL, Docker, binsnitch & more


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Mattias Geniar, May 21, 2017

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Welcome to another issue of cron.weekly, for Sunday, May 21st, 2017.

This turned out to be a shorter issue than usual, and I can’t put my finger on why. I might’ve missed a lot of the news or it’s just been quiet a week. 🙂

Either way, if you think I missed any projects or if you’d like to plug your own blogpost related to Linux, send me an e-mail!

News

Taking Zero-Downtime Load Balancing even Further

The team at Yelp describes how they built their load balancing stack, using Nginx at the TLS layer and HAProxy for the bulk of the load balancing. Some good details are shared regarding Unix socket sharing & TCP listeners.

Sudo Satirical

This is ‘The Onion’, but for Linux. This site offers you a satirical look at the world of Linux & open source!

CentOS 7.4 to ship with TLS 1.2 + ALPN

Good news for anyone trying to serve HTTP/2 traffic on a RHEL or CentOS machine: the new RHEL/CentOS 7.4, due to be released somewhere in Q3 this year, will add support for ALPN in OpenSSL. Without ALPN, HTTP/2 will not work on clients using the Chrome browser.

Tools & Projects

Datadog: all your infrastructure, in one place

Track & alert on the health and performance of every server, container, and app in any environment, with Datadog. Sign up for a free 14-day trial. (Sponsored)

HackerTarget: Online Vulnerability Scanners

Your favourite Open Source Vulnerability Scanners hosted online for remote security testing. With HackerTarget, perform once off scans or schedule jobs to alert on changes to Internet facing systems. Signup now for immediate access(Sponsored)

nginx-module-sysguard

This module allows you to throttle HTTP(s) requests when system load goes too high, average time per request exceeds a certain treshold, …

beetbox

Beetbox is essentially a pre-provisioned version of Drupal VM mainly to speed up initial virtual machine build time, but also to reduce the size of each VM by leveraging linked clones.

badger

A new key/value data store, built in Go. It claims to be 3.5x faster than RocksDB.

RocksDB

While reading up on badger, I realised I hadn’t heard of “RocksDB” yet: also a key/value data store, built on top of Google technology and released by the Facebook engineering team.

fsql

Search through your filesystem with SQL-esque queries. Reminded me about osquery, that allows you to query your entire infrastructure through SQL.

zetcd

zetcd is a proxy that can accept ZooKeeper requests and deliver them to an etcd cluster. If you’re thinking of replacing ZooKeeper, this looks like a good tool to help you move to etcd.

Guides & Tutorials

Estimating CPU Per Query With Weighted Linear Regression

It’s sometimes impossible to answer what’s consuming resources like CPU, IO, & memory in a complex software such as a database. This ebook explains how a specialization of ordinary linear regression answers seemingly unsolvable database questions. (Sponsored)

How To Configure MySQL Group Replication on Ubuntu 16.04

This post takes it a step further beyond the classic master/slave (write/read split) MySQL replication setups, by configuring group replication. This example configures 3 nodes.

5 Docker Utilities You Should Know

This post introduced a few tools I hadn’t heard of; watchtower, docker-gc, docker-slim & a couple more.

Using binsnitch.py to detect files touched by malware

Binsnitch is similar to TripWire; it keeps a checksum database of all your system files and will alert you whenever any of them change.

Create a SOCKS proxy on a Linux server

Using just SSH, you can create a SOCKS proxy that can channel all your browser traffic. If you’re looking to bypass some ISP limitations, this is a very simple way of doing so. All you need is SSH access.



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