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

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.

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

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.

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.

A simple, low-overhead web dashboard for Linux.

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!

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

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

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.

An Open Source Document Management & Collaboration System

Guides & Tutorials

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.