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Infrastructure & DevOps

The most popular blog posts about infrastructure & devops on Hacker News. 321 posts.

2025
211

The Limits of NTP Accuracy on Linux

Lately I’ve been trying to find (and understand) the limits of time syncing between Linux systems. How accurate can you get? What does it take to get that? And what things can easily add measurable amounts of time error? After most of a month (!), I’m starting to understand things. This is kind of a follow-on to a…

212

Tailscale Services

Tailscale Services is a new way to define available resources on your network and expand the granularity of your access controls to resources that may not have Tailscale installed on them.

213

Monitoring My Homelab, Simply

Don’t get me wrong, I understand that they’re essential for large fleets of services with fast-changing software and teams of oncallers working around the clock to understand the complex ways that complex systems fail… but my stuff doesn’t change that often, failures are mundane and low-scope, and I’m the only person…

217

How I like to install NixOS (declaratively)

For one of my network storage PC builds, I was looking for an alternative to Flatcar Container Linux and tried out NixOS again (after an almost 10 year break). There are many ways to install NixOS, and in this article I will outline how I like to install NixOS on physical hardware or virtual machines: over the network…

218

A brief look at FreeBSD

Recently I've been playing around with FreeBSD in a virtual machine. The reason for this is that (if all goes well) some time in December my new Framework laptop will arrive, replacing my current X1 Carbon that is starting to show signs of old age (e.g. a keyboard where certain keys don't always work). Framework in…

219

Push Notifications for Decentralized Services

How mobile push notifications currently bring centralization to decentralized services, and how we can avoid it, even for mainstream configurations. Published the 31/01/2025 This post will focus on Android. We all know decentralized applications: emails, Mastodon (and the Fediverse), Nextcloud and other clouds, Git…

220

Heartbeats in Distributed Systems

In distributed systems, one of the fundamental challenges is knowing whether a node or service is alive and functioning properly. Unlike monolithic applications, where everything runs in a single process, distributed systems span multiple machines, networks, and data centers. This becomes even glaring when the nodes…

222

Cloudflare outage should not have happened

[BROKEN LINK: blog/google-cloud-s-outage-should-not-have-happened-and-they-seem-to-be-missing-the-point-on-how-to-avoid-it-in-the-future.pre-processed.org], another global IT outage happened (dèjá vu strikes again in our industry). This time at cloudflare(Prince 2025). Again, taking down large swaths of the internet…