Welcome to cron.weekly issue #84 for Sunday, June 11th, 2017.

Lots of new tools & guides again this time, it’s a really packed issue. I’m always amazed at the rate the community can write high-quality guides and ship new open source projects – Keep it up!

To my dad, who’s also subscribed; happy Father’s Day! You’re the reason I’m in IT today.

Enjoy your Sunday folks.

News

Lots of Hadoop systems out there that are (accidentally) exposing terrabytes of data … This was only a matter of time, and there are still plenty of unauthenticated protocols running behind unfirewalled servers.

Deciding on new technology is always hard, which is why I like posts like these. A good comparison of time series databases, focussing on Prometheus, Grafana & Graphite.

This post focusses on the dev-side of things, but I believe it applies to Ops as well. It’s always nice to read how Google or other “companies at scale” handle things, but most of us have to keep our feet on the ground and be pragmatic about design choices, whether those are software or infrastructure. In this post, trade-offs of Cassandra vs. PostgreSQL are considered.

There are UUIDs all around us, from database identifiers to cluster memberships to … This post dives into the history of the UUID.

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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)

“I wrote it out of frustration with Ansible”. Welder allows you to set up a Linux server with plain shell scripts.

warp lets you securely share your terminal with one simple command: `warp open`. When connected to your warp, clients can see your terminal exactly as if they were sitting next to you.

This one’s already slightly older, but still worth it if you hadn’t hear of it! This repo contains subtle and not-so-subtle shell tweaks that will slowly drive people insane. Think BOFH.

The GNU Debugger reaches a 8.0 milestone; improvements for C++ & python, new target architectures & programming languages I’ve never even heard of. 🙂

Rate limit messages from stdin. (keep or drop those exceeding the limit). Useful when ‘tail -f’ on a quickly increasing file or sending data to a remote system. Many use cases here!

kbsecret is a combined library/utility that provides a secret management interface for KBFS and Keybase.

This tool convert `_docker inspect_` to opencontainers (OCI compatible) runc spec.

One-Click Cash Payments, GNU Taler is an electronic payment system under development.

Duplicacy is a new generation cross-platform cloud backup tool based on the idea of Lock-Free Deduplication. It supports all major cloud storage providers like Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, Microsoft Azure, Dropbox, …

A HashiCorp Vault UI panel written with VueJS and Vault native Go API.

Personal Relationship Manager – a CRM to manage your friends and family, written in Laravel (PHP).

This is a makefile designed to be dropped in to a project and for the most part “just work” after a little bit of configuration in a config.mk file.

Point releases usually aren’t that interesting, but this one adds experimental MySQL backend support to Grafana. Grafana now allows you to query and visualize data from a MySQL compatible database.

Guides & Tutorials

Nagios got you down? False alarms ruining your sleep? If you’re looking to fix your monitoring and need expert help, we should chat. (Sponsored)

A solid set of principles to follow when running Kubernetes, including improved build stages for Docker, dealing with zombie & orphaned containers, logging, …

This guide configures an SSH daemon to limit SFTP access to one directory with no SSH access allowed on per user basis.

A quick comparison of VirtualBox to LXC, Docker & the likes and then a good set of CLI tools to help working with VirtualBox.

A good intro with the necessary tools & one-liners to interpret containers, detect isolation and a fair amount of code to show how those things get implemented.

This thorough write-up gives you a good description of ‘select’, ‘poll’ and ‘epoll’ system calls. It’s all about how to monitor a lot of file descriptors for new input/output.

A very familiar tale, especially when you’re just starting out managing MySQL databases. Accidentally removing files, how do you go about recovering data?

In this post, the author explores what you can possibly do with access to /dev/input directory.

Some more low-level details, this time on time keeping, this time focussing on KVM, Xen, and Hyper-V related time-keeping techniques and the corresponding parts of the Linux kernel.

A big collection of useful `sed` examples.

Linux bridge is a layer 2 virtual device that on its own cannot receive or transmit anything unless you bind one or more real devices to it. In this post, you dive deep into the config and inner workings of Linux Bridges.