Free, Libre, and Open Source Software and Standards

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 19, 2025

• Linuxiac ☛ ClamAV to Cut Signature Database Size by 50%

  ClamAV will retire outdated signatures on December 16, reducing both databases by about 50% to improve performance and trim update costs.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • Marc Brooker ☛ Why Strong Consistency?

    When I started at AWS in 2008, we ran the EC2 control plane on a tree of MySQL databases: a primary to handle writes, a secondary to take over from the primary, a handful of read replicas to scale reads, and some extra replicas for doing latency-insensitive reporting stuff. All of thing was linked together with MySQL’s statement-based replication. It worked pretty well day to day, but two major areas of pain have stuck with me ever since: operations were costly, and eventual consistency made things weird.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Morten Linderud ☛ Self-hosting DNS for no fun, but a little profit!

    I was planning on writing up a bit of the things I’ve learned while working on a setup up to self-host authoritative DNS servers for my domains, now seems like a good time! I hope it gives people a bit of motivation to self-host DNS.

    The intention here is not to list all available options, but list the decisions I made. The goal here is not to self-host a complete redundant DNS server setup. I personally don’t have time for that, but I would like to not be tied to the DNS services of the registrar I’m using, and also have agency over how my domains are being run.

  • Six Colors ☛ Why does my device stick to the wrong Wi-Fi router?

    You may never have heard the term Extended Service Set Identifier (ESSID), and why should you have? It’s a mildly esoteric term in the Wi-Fi world for how multiple routers with the same name form an extended network. In fact, it’s not even a protocol; it’s just a name, which makes it even more confusing.

    So why would I bring it up? Because the notion of an Extended Service Set affects how we connect to Wi-Fi networks, and why you sometimes have a rotten connection when you’re bathing in the soothing high-speed waves of a nearby router.

  • Greg Morris ☛ Simple, Local, TXT

    There is a peace in knowing that my words sit on my device, readable by anything from TextEdit to Ulysses. No login required, no server ping needed. Just text. The best tools get out of the way, and nothing gets out of the way quite like a .txt file.