News

OpenZFS Merged to FreeBSD

With OpenZFS support in FreeBSD-CURRENT, the next big step in FreeBSD’s moving away from their ZFS implementation is completed.

https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=364746

Fedora 33 Will Use BTRFS as Default File System

Now it is official: The default filesystem of the upcoming Fedora release will be BTRFS.

I’m a heavy ZFS user on the server-side, and in the more than 15 years I’m using it, it never behaved unexpectedly once. So I don’t have the desire to experiment with anything else there. But with a clean installation of the new Fedora release on my desktop machine, I’m looking forward to collecting some experience with BTRFS.

https://pagure.io/fesco/issue/2429

Articles

Netflix Optimized 4K Streams

Netflix substantially improved its 4K Stream encoding. On average, the same quality now needs half the bitrate. The improvement is dependent on the source material. In some rare cases, the optimized version will use an even higher bitrate.

https://netflixtechblog.com/optimized-shot-based-encodes-for-4k-now-streaming-47b516b10bbb

Inside the Hidden World of Legacy IT Systems

This lengthy article takes a look into the antiquated IT systems, the effort of keeping them alive, and how the situation could be improved. It always puzzles me that long-term maintenance costs don’t play a more prominent role in the planning phase of IT projects. The article confirms that operations and maintenance are the most significant cost factors in IT systems.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/it/inside-hidden-world-legacy-it-systems

A Decade of Account Takeover

This blog classifies ten years of account takeover (ATO) incidents.

https://ato.watch/2020-decade/

What If Technology Belonged to the People?

»Digital technologies need not be tied to corporations or even markets—they can be subordinated to the task of creating explicitly non-market forms of social coordination.«

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/xg8k5d/what-if-technology-belonged-to-the-people

How a Kubernetes Pod Gets an IP Address

An SRE at LinkedIn explains basic pod networking concepts. The blog is not only useful for those interested in Kubernetes but also in Linux container networking in general.

https://ronaknathani.com/blog/2020/08/how-a-kubernetes-pod-gets-an-ip-address/

Setting the Timezone in podman Containers

Podman now comes with a --tz flag to set the container timezone. It is introduced with version 2.1 of podman, and therefore not yet available in the current stable releases 8.2 of RHEL and CentOS.

https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/tick-tock-container-time

Kindle Collects a Surprisingly Large Amount of Data

»Surprisingly« is used ironically here, right?

https://nullsweep.com/kindle-collects-a-surprisingly-large-amount-of-data/

Understanding DNS

As the author says, a clear, thorough guide to understanding how DNS records work, directed at people not yet familiar with the Domain Name System.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/08/understanding-dns-anatomy-of-a-bind-zone-file/

Zoom is Now Critical Infrastructure

I agree with the author, that so many companies and public institutions relying on so few technology providers is not a good thing. In case of video conferencing solutions there are some really good OSS video conferencing alternatives available such as Jitsi and BigBlueButton for example.

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2020/08/27/zoom-is-now-critical-infrastructure-thats-a-concern/

https://www.threatspike.com/blog/zoom_cookies.html

https://gizmodo.com/zoom-is-down-at-the-worst-possible-time-1844825643

Projects and Software

Open in Vim Extension for Visual Studio Code

I find myself working in Visual Studio Code quite often lately. I know that there are Vim emulations for Visual Studio Code, but for Vim commands, I prefer using Vim itself.

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=jonsmithers.open-in-vim

https://searx.space/

Directory of public searx instances. Searx is a self-hosted, privacy-respecting metasearch engine. Stumbling upon this site reminded me that I have to bring my searx instance back to life. Sadly the FreeBSD port I was running it from is deprecated, and my instance stopped working some months ago.

https://searx.space/

Videos

The Future of the Past: Challenges in Archival Storage

The task of preserving the bits and the meaning of the data is not as trivial as one might think. The talk also includes a comparison of properties of different storage media, including DNA.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVwJqqXeMqY

Outages

Postmortem Google Cloud Issue Week 34

Google provided a detailed summary of the Google Cloud Issue last week. https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en//appsstatus/ir/bd9m3vkqwpvkk4j.pdf

:wq