today's howtos
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Tarpit Ideas
Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel at Y Combinator call these ideas "Tarpit Ideas" (a much better term, much better than my "Flying-Car Syndrome"). There's probably no other institution that has seen more nascent startup pitches than Y Combinator, so they are in a unique position to think about this. Some notes on some of the ideas they touch upon in their conversation, "Avoid These Tempting Startup Ideas."
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Linux - connect to a serial port with screen
There are a bunch of programs out there, that can get you connected to a serial port of a switch, but using screen was the best and easiest solution I've found. Works perfectly in the CLI, can be run in the background, and easy to set up - if it is not already installed.
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Prometheus Blackbox 0.23.0 has added a nice improvement to its DNS checks
Our Prometheus system does a bunch of DNS lookups through Blackbox for various purposes. We check that our own DNS servers correctly resolve various things from our domain (and harvest the SOA values in the process so we can verify that everything is in sync), we check that our secondaries properly have our stuff, we check that our internal forwarding resolvers can resolve outside domains, and we check that some outside public DNS servers can resolve things in our domain as a sanity check.
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tree Command Examples in Linux
You are already familiar with the directory structure in Linux. It is like the roots of a tree.