news
Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers
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Vincent Bernat ☛ Vincent Bernat: Scaling Akvorado BMP RIB with sharding
To associate routing information—like AS paths or BGP communities—to flows, Akvorado can import routes through the BGP Monitoring Protocol (BMP). As the Internet routing table contains more than 1 million routes, Akvorado needs to scale to tens of millions of routes.1 This has been a long-standing challenge,2 but I expect this issue is now fixed by using RIB sharding, a method that splits the routing database into several parts to enable concurrent updates.
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Web Browsers/Web Servers/Feed Readers
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David Pasek ☛ FreeBSD - A True Unix Way: NGINX with Automatic HTTPS Using Let’s Encrypt and Active24 DNS Challenge
This article describes how to deploy NGINX on FreeBSD with both HTTP and HTTPS support, where the TLS certificate is automatically issued and renewed using Let’s Encrypt, acme.sh, and the Active24 DNS API.
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Adolfo Ochagavía ☛ Fully in-browser container builds
Honestly, I think in-browser container builds are mostly a gimmick, which is probably why nobody has spent time documenting them before. The experiment is fun, though, and it serves to showcase the powers of custom container tooling.
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SaaS/Back End/Databases
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Paolo Melchiorre ☛ Upgrade PostgreSQL from 17 to 18 on Ubuntu 26.04
After upgrade Ubuntu from version 25.10 (Questing Quokka) to 26.04 (Resolute Raccoon): [...]
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The Architecture of Open Source Applications ☛ The Architecture of Open Source Applications (Volume 1)Berkeley DB
Conway's Law states that a design reflects the structure of the organization that produced it. Stretching that a bit, we might anticipate that a software artifact designed and initially produced by two people might somehow reflect, not merely the structure of the organization, but the internal biases and philosophies each brings to the table. One of us (Seltzer) has spent her career between the worlds of filesystems and database management systems. If questioned, she'll argue the two are fundamentally the same thing, and furthermore, operating systems and database management systems are essentially both resource managers and providers of convenient abstractions. The differences are "merely" implementation details. The other (Bostic) believes in the tool-based approach to software engineering and in the construction of components based on simpler building blocks, because such systems are invariably superior to monolithic architectures in the important "-bilities": understandability, extensibility, maintainability, testability, and flexibility.
When you combine those two perspectives, it's not surprising to learn that together we spent much of the last two decades working on Berkeley DB—a software library that provides fast, flexible, reliable and scalable data management. Berkeley DB provides much of the same functionality that people expect from more conventional systems, such as relational databases, but packages it differently. For example, Berkeley DB provides fast data access, both keyed and sequential, as well as transaction support and recovery from failure. However, it provides those features in a library that links directly with the application that needs those services, rather than being made available by a standalone server application.
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Education
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Ned Batchelder ☛ PyCon US 2026
Last week was PyCon US in Long Beach California. As always, it was a jam-packed intense time. I’ll try to report on my experience. The videos aren’t uploaded yet, but I’ll link to them later when they are.
This recap is longer than I’ve done in the past. I don’t know why, it’s just how it came out. I want to convey a sense of what I get out of PyCon and what you can get out of PyCon.
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