cron.weekly issue #50: PHP, Ubuntu 16.10, Galaxy, Yarn, libreboot, AWS, Postgres & more!


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Mattias Geniar, October 16, 2016

Follow me on Twitter as @mattiasgeniar

50 weekly issues, uninterrupted. I don’t know about you, but I’m looking forward to the next 50!

Plenty of good links to share once again, open source just keeps on giving.

There’s also a new sponsor: Datadog. Go pay those folks a visit!

News

Globalsign Certificate Revocation Issue

If you were scratching your head last Thursday about funky SSL/TLS errors, this might be the reason: Globalsign accidentally revoked an intermediate certificate used in millions of certificates. So much for the chain of trust, right?

Taking PHP seriously

An homage to the PHP language: despite it getting a lot of critique, the ecosystem and community around it have made PHP to the most popular web-oriented language today.

Ubuntu 16.10 released

Right on time, Canonical released the 16.10 version of Ubuntu: improved OpenStack support, kernel 4.8 and many updates related to desktop users.

MySQL 8.0: The end of MyISAM

The use of MyISAM is now actively discouraged as of MySQL server 8.0: it’s InnoDB all the way.

Red Hat open sources Ansible’s Galaxy

Ansible Galaxy is a place where the community can share and search for Ansible roles, code, modules, … That source code is now open source, allowing anyone to either run it locally (self-hosted) or contribute to the official hub.

FreeBSD 11.0

A new FreeBSD release! The post announces plenty of new features and improvements.

Exploring CLI Best Practices

Such a good overview of what it takes to create intuitive, easy-to-use and stable CLI tools: it covers default options, short vs. long parameters, common patterns, positional options, …

Tools & Projects

Datadog

With Datadog, you can see all your data in one place. Servers, clouds, apps, and more. Metrics, alerts, usage. Sign up for a free 14-day trial. (Sponsored)

nodejs-dashboard

Telemetry dashboard for node.js apps from the terminal! Determine in realtime what’s happening inside your node process from the terminal. No need to instrument code to get the deets. Also splits stderr/stdout to help spot errors sooner.

yarn

Fast, reliable, and secure dependency management for your NodeJS projects. Yarn can replace your npm installations and should be faster, with local caches and better dependency resolution & debugging.

HyperKitty

I wanted to include this for the name alone! HyperKitty is a web interface to access GNU Mailman v3 archives. I’m looking into replacing my own mailing list archive with something more modern, this just might be it.

NOMMU Linux

An interest approach to Linux: this OS does not use a virtual address mapper for memory, all memory addresses are physical addresses. This has some interesting consequences for memory management!

git-repo

A nice CLI wrapper for Github that allows you to fork, commit & create a pull request straight from your CLI. You never have to open Github.

SummitDB

SummitDB is an in-memory, NoSQL key/value database. It persists to disk, is ACID compliant, and built on a transactional and strongly-consistent model. It supports custom indexes, geospatial data, JSON documents, and user-defined JS scripting.

ResinOS

Run Docker containers on embedded devices: a host OS tailored for containers, designed for reliability, proven in production.

libreboot

Libreboot is a free BIOS or UEFI replacement; libre boot firmware that initializes the hardware and starts a bootloader for your operating system. It’s also an open source BIOS.

Guides & Tutorials

Docker Stats Monitoring: Taking Dockbeat for a Ride

This post explores the latest addition to the ELK stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash & Kibana): dockbeat. Dockbeat was contributed by the ELK community and is focused on using the docker stats API to push container resource usage metrics such as memory, IO, and CPU to either Elasticsearch or Logstash.

Mastering test environments with Docker

In this article, the author shows how to use Docker Compose to pick and choose services and branches for any local or QA environment. He also showcases the branch-aware build pipeline introduced in Jenkins 2.0.

Why is Apache Vulnerable by Default?

Some good first steps when you first deploy an Apache webserver; disable server versions, disable the TRACE HTTP method, disable indexes & a couple of other good tricks.

Amazon Web Services – a practical guide

This is an insanely large and detailed guide to using AWS and making the most out of it: lessons learned, best practices, hidden features that are actually lifesavers, …

Understanding caching in Postgres – An in-depth guide

A very extensive overview of the different caching layers in Postgres, covering memory areas, LRU algoritmes, the configurations and how to tweak them, …

An introduction to bash completion

A nice guide on how to extend the Bash TAB-completion yourself, either for your own CLI tools or for the convenience of existing commands.

LinuxCon Europe slides

All the presenter slides for LinuxCon Europe are available online: plenty of interesting topics, fingers crossed there were recordings and those make it online too.

Videos

From ‘git tag’ to kernel release

What goes on behind the scenes after someone does a “git tag” for the new kernel release and it showing up on servers & mirrors worldwide? Quite a lot of code signing, that’s for sure!



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