Welcome to cron.weekly issue #106 for Sunday, November 19th, 2017.
This one contains a bit less text, but still plenty of links for some Sunday (or Monday, I don’t judge) reading. It’s been a busy week, so excuse the brevity of most accompanying text.
News
Kernel 4.14
A new LTS kernel has been born: 4.14 landed last Sunday!
Linux 4.14 arrives and Linus says it should have fewer 0-days
Some more background to the 4.14 release, including the additional tooling around finding potential vulnerabilities.
Security things in 4.14
That new LTS release comes with a lot of incremental security features for a variety of architectures.
Red Hat introduces Arm server support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux
We can probably expect a supporting CentOS release too, soon. This is good news for System on a Chip (SoC) devices! For more reading, have a look at the ZDNet article.
Linux totally dominates supercomputers
Well good news, the top 500 of super computers all run Linux! There’s an interesting discussion on Hacker News about the absence of BSD.
Learn just enough Linux to get things done
This is one we can try to get in the hands of as many non-techies as possible, it advocates the why as much as the how of using Linux.
Tools & Projects
Get full-stack observability with Datadog
Go from a global view of your infrastructure to inspecting an individual request trace, all in one developer-friendly platform. Start a free 14-day trial. (Sponsored)
RUDDER – upgrade your IT to Continuous Configuration
RUDDER is the open source and multi-platform solution combining traditional configuration management and continuous auditing. Dedicated to production infrastructure needs, RUDDER lets you safely face continuous growth, threats and regulatory requirements. Watch the demo video! (Sponsored)
jsn
jsn (pronunciation: json) – an absolutely simple & terse CLI app to manipulate JSON data.
Fedora 27
Lots of minor improvements to mostly the desktop version, but it also includes a new release of their Fedora Atomic, a server OS specific for running containers.
Kibana 6.0
This popular dashboard & visualisation tool reached version 6.0, with highlights of threshold alerting, dashboard-only mode (think kiosks), its own query language, CSV exports, …
Logstash 6.0
Together with Kibana, Elastic also announced Logstash 6.0: multiple pipelines, better config management, visualization tools, …
Elasticsearch 6.0
And to tie it all up, powering Kibana & Logstash is their Elastic Search project: zero downtime upgrades, multi-cluster search, faster restarts, faster queries, …
Vault 0.9
Hashicorp’s Vault does “secret management” (passwords, ssh keys, …): this new release has a lot of new features like identity management, support for HSM & lot of enterprise-only features.
pspg
A small specialized pager for PostgreSQL, optimized for tabular data.
gitfs
gitfs is a FUSE file system that fully integrates with git. You can mount a remote repository’s branch locally, and any subsequent changes made to the files will be automatically committed to the remote.
puffs
Puffs is a domain-specific language and library for parsing untrusted file formats safely. Examples of such file formats include images, audio, video, fonts and compressed archives.
SQL Operations Studio
SQL Operations Studio is a data management tool that enables working with SQL Server, Azure SQL DB and SQL DW from Windows, macOS and Linux.
Guides & Tutorials
Continuous Delivery for Mobile Development – GoCD
This post chronicles a mobile app development team’s journey to continuous delivery, the challenges along the way, how they overcame them and their thoughts beyond continuous delivery. Check it out. (Sponsored)
Linux port sharding demo
Demo showing how to use the SO_REUSEPORT linux socket option, allowing multiple processes to listen on the same TCP or UDP port.
10 layers of Linux container security
A good reminder of the security measures one can – and should – take when working with containers.
What is KVM?
In this post, the author looks at the move from Amazon to replace Xen with KVM and dives deeper into what makes KVM special.
Coping with the TCP TIME-WAIT state on busy Linux servers
I think I linked to this one a long time ago, but it’s worth repeating: it is one of the best guides out there for scaling your Linux boxes beyond the defaults in terms of network connections. It also includes a good reminder on TCP (quadruplets, src/dst ports, sysctl tweaks, …).