cron.weekly issue #54: PHP 7, LessPass, addrwatch, tmux, bash, PackPack & more!


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Mattias Geniar, November 13, 2016

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Welcome to cron.weekly issue #54 for Sunday, November 13th, 2016.

Plenty of Docker info once again; from beginner guides to questions to ask when running in production. If this continues, I’ll rename _cron.weekly _to docker.weekly. 😉

Besides Docker there are – once again – a lot of new open source tools with several very interesting ones like LessPass and PackPack. Read on for more info!

News

PHP 7 at Tumblr

The team at Tumblr recently switched all their PHP servers from 5.6 to 7.0: the result is a 2x faster frontend experience with only 50% CPU usage. Lots of graphs and insights in the post.

The status of kernel hardening

This article covers a lot of techniques (like KASLR) that the Linux kernel uses to protect itself.

code.gov: US federal government open sources tools

There’s lots of code in there: the US federal government has done a tremendous effort to open source a lot of their tools. There’s really to much to sum up, I count over 50 projects from CSS and JavaScript to Swift and PHP.

The End of the General Purpose Operating System

If containers are going to take over the world, we should see people care less about Fedora, Debian or Ubuntu, as that becomes just a means of hosting a container: the real Operating System is the container you run.

Tools & Projects

linux-dash

A simple, low-overhead web dashboard for Linux.

LessPass

This is a “Next-Gen” Open Source Password Manager built on the idea that you never need to store passwords, just regenerate them based on the domain name, a username and your master password. Clever idea!

addrwatch

This is a tool similar to arpwatch. It main purpose is to monitor network and log discovered ethernet/ip pairings.

Metronome

In previous issue (#53) I mentioned Chronos as a replacement to ‘cron’. Turns out, that project has been obsoleted by Metronome: an Apache Mesos framework for scheduled jobs.

Ring

Ring is free software for universal communication: video calling, chat & android apps. It also recently joined GNU.

PackPack

PackPack is a simple tool to build RPM and Debian packages from git repositories: fast reproducible builds using Docker containers, semantic versioning based on annotated git tags and it supportt all major Linux distributions as targets.

PaperNIC

An Open Source Document Management & Collaboration System

Guides & Tutorials

Running Docker in production for 6 months

Some really good questions to ask when running Docker in production: how to define a proper workflow for your development team, handling dependencies & long build times, where to store databases, … lost of food for thought.

Introduction to Docker

Every week a new “intro to Docker” comes out, this has to tell something about the complexity of Docker. This post however explains it very nicely, with easy to understand examples and code snippets.

What Am Container

A “what’s a container” article written from the point of view of a developer: quite a bit of introduction to virtual resources like memory, CPU and disk and good write-up on the concept of a “container” and the problems it solves.

Benefits of using tmux

If you haven’t heard of tmux yet (or if you’re now using screen), have a look here: lots of good tips on how to use tmux in your environment to detach from an SSH session and the benefits that offers.

Bash scripting tutorial: A coding style guideline

Style guides are personal to everyone: it’s a matter of what you or your organisation prefers. There’s usually no rights or wrongs. This post gives a good couple of examples on how to style your Bash scripts for readability and maintainability.



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