Welcome to cron.weekly issue #56 for Sunday, November 27th, 2016.

It’s been a little over a year since I started cron.weekly, I totally missed the anniversary a few weeks ago. Either way, happy 1st birthday cron.weekly!

There’s plenty of variation in this weeks’ content too, from interesting projects to guides, news about Debian planning to remove ye old /usr/bin split, Fedora 25 is out, …

Grab a coffee and enjoy your Sunday read!

News

It was already rumoured in January of this year that Debian might be saying farewell to the /bin vs. /usr/bin split. Instead, the idea is to have things like /bin and /sbin be symlinks to /usr/bin and /usr/sbin, doing away with the split place for binaries.

This weeks’ Humble Bundle is especially interesting: for 15$ you can buy 16 Linux and open source related ebooks, from shell scripting to network troubleshooting to learning about sed & awk.

Some back-and-forths between a systemd maintainer and a Linux user. It takes a closer look at systemd’s sandboxing abilities and where it might (not) benefit certain applications, taking Apache and Samba as examples.

The maintainer of PHP’s popular package manager takes a look at the PHP versions most often found in the wild: PHP 7 is growing rapidly and some older EOL versions are slowly starting to disappear.

With Datadog, you can see all your data in one place. See Amazon stats on your servers, as well as detailed numbers of your PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, Node & other applications. Sign up for a free 14-day trial. (Sponsored)

A free cloud server for 2 hours, perfect if you need a temporary playground or if you maintain an open source project and want to offer users a “one-click” button to test your project on.

A new fedora release is out. Version 25 marks the entry of the Wayland display server, a much anticipated change for Linux on the desktop.

Most of the software in use by OS X 10.12 is now open sourced, this page lists all tools.

Cuckoo is an open source automated malware analysis system, offering an environment where you can safely discover the ins and outs of malware.

This is a new Java web-based frontend for your git: search commits and history, controlling write-access per branch, etc.

TestDisk is free data recovery software. It was primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software: certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally deleting a Partition Table). Partition table recovery using TestDisk is really easy.

A Pipfile, and its related Pipfile.lock, are a new (and much better!) replacement for pip’s requirements.txt files.

An encrypted team password manager: safely store and share passwords or even files with people you work with!

A small webserver for when you’re in a hurry: a single binary, no config files, no dependencies.

Guides & Tutorials

Zabbix is a powerful monitoring solution, but the real value is in extending it to fit your own needs. This write-up covers writing your own custom checks in the Zabbix Agent.

You delete a file in Linux and the “df” command doesn’t show a reduction in disk usage, how’s that even possible? Enter file descriptors, this guide walks you through it.

This post starts with a good introduction to ‘auditd’ and its abilities. It then unveils the go-audit tool to enhance those features, where you can replace auditd with go-audit. Go-audit is a replacement for the userspace part of auditd.

This post highlights the powers of Docker’s copy-on-write filesystem to be able to see all the filesystem changes after a security breach. It also shows the benefit of running your Docker instances as read-only copies, preventing any disk changes inside a container.

Percona dives into the abilities of Docker to run your database engines in. I won’t spoil the question just yet, read on for the answer.

It doesn’t get more complete than this: the history of Bash with all the features clearly explained.