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Infrastructure & DevOps

The most popular blog posts about infrastructure & devops on Hacker News. 1,839 posts.

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993

Reverse Engineering a Docker Image

This started with a consulting snafu: Government organisation A got government organisation B to develop a web application. Government organisation B subcontracted part of the work to somebody. Hosting and maintenance of the project was later contracted out to a private-sector company C. Company C discovered that the…

994

Why is there only one Snap Store?

Snap and Flatpak are the basis of two universal app stores for Linux: the Snap Store and Flathub. Interestingly, Flatpak has multiple repositories: Flathub is the main one but both Fedora and Elementary OS also host their own store. In contrast; there is only one Snap store. Why is that?

996

Serving 200M requests per day with a CGI-bin

In the early 2000s, we used to write a lot of CGI programs. This was the primary way to make websites dynamic at the time. These CGI programs were usually written in Perl, but sometimes in C to increase performance. The CGI mechanism is conceptually simple but powerful. When the web server receives an incoming request…

1002

Why I dislike systemd

As a Linux sysadmin in the 2010s, it's hard not to have an opinion on systemd. But what I find baffling about it is how divisive it is; nearly everyone (or at least the most vocal crowd) seems to either love it or hate it. When I tell people that systemd was the catalyst for my defection to OpenBSD last year, their…

1007

Celery – Best Practices

If you’ve worked with Django at some point you probably had the need for some background processing of long running tasks. Chances are you’ve used some sort of task queue, and Celery is currently the most popular project for this sort of thing in the Python (and Django) world (but there are others).

1013

Passive Solar Water Desalination

I know we are supposed to be worried about the world supply of fresh water. I have been hearing that at least for the last 40 years, and the statistics are alarming. According to the Global Commission on the Economics of Water: "We are seeing the consequences not of freak events, nor of population growth

1014

Deploying fiber in the home

Getting a fiber Internet connection to your home is a big deal! It’s probably the last physical connection you’ll ever need, due to the virtually unlimited bandwidth, stability, performance, and attainable speeds.

1015

Programming Inside a Container

I have a small collection of servers, laptops and desktops. My servers were purchased and configured at different times. By design, they have different hardware and software configurations. I have processors from AMD, Intel, Ampere and Rockchip. I have a wide range of Linux distributions, both old and new. I also…