News and Articles

Scaling the Root of the DNS

Geoff Huston gives insight into DNS root zones and their scaling issues.

https://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2020-09/root.html

Preemptible Instances in Production at CERN

Most cloud providers offer lower-cost preemptible instances to utilize their servers to capacity. At CERN, they have similar challenges with spare capacity on their OpenStack based private cloud. So they decided to implement an orchestrator for preemptible instances called Aardvark. The author also mentions the problems they are still facing.

https://techblog.web.cern.ch/techblog/post/preemptible-instances/

Prometheus TSDB

This series of blog posts explains the internals of Prometheus. At the time of writing, the first three articles were available:

https://ganeshvernekar.com/blog/prometheus-tsdb-the-head-block/

https://ganeshvernekar.com/blog/prometheus-tsdb-wal-and-checkpoint/

https://ganeshvernekar.com/blog/prometheus-tsdb-mmapping-head-chunks-from-disk/

Definitely Not Windows 95: What Operating Systems Keep Things Running in Space?

The author sheds light on real-time operating systems (RTOS) used in space flight. Fascinating read on VxWorks, RTEMS, and the concepts behind RTOS.

https://arstechnica.com/features/2020/10/the-space-operating-systems-booting-up-where-no-one-has-gone-before/

Gitter Joins Matrix

The chat platform Gitter, previously owned by GitLab, will soon be speaking Matrix natively. I like the whole Matrix ecosystem, so in my opinion, this is excellent news!

https://matrix.org/blog/2020/09/30/welcoming-gitter-to-matrix

https://element.io/blog/gitter-is-joining-element/

How to Properly Manage SSH Keys for Server Access

This blog post describes how to use a private CA to manage user and role-based SSH access to servers.

https://www.paepper.com/blog/posts/how-to-properly-manage-ssh-keys-for-server-access/

Releases and Projects

GDPR Enforcement Tracker

»This website contains a list and overview of fines and penalties which data protection authorities within the EU have imposed under the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR, DSGVO)«

https://www.enforcementtracker.com

Nmap 7.90

https://seclists.org/nmap-announce/2020/1

The first Nmap release for over a year contains a lot of improvements and bug fixes. These include better OS and service/version detection, new NSE scripts, protocol libraries, payloads for host discovery, port scanning, and version detection. They also cleaned up the licensing. Nmap is now published under the Nmap Public Source License.

OpenSSH 8.4

With this OpenSSH release, the developers announced that SHA-1 public key signature algorithm would be disabled by default in a »near-future« release. OpenSSH 8.4 also extends native FIDO/U2F support.

https://www.openssh.com/txt/release-8.4

Grep 3.5

The GNU implementation of grep is available in version 3.5. The changelog is not that long. Apart from some bug fixes, how matches in binary files are reported to the user has been changed slightly.

https://savannah.gnu.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=9820

Kubernetes Ingress Now GA

The Ingress API, first introduced in 2015, has now reached general availability.

https://opensource.googleblog.com/2020/09/kubernetes-ingress-goes-ga.html

:wq