System administration is a special are of IT. It also has a special place in my heart. It is an interesting mixture of all the other disciplines, both common across the whole industry, and at the same time unique for each person, company, and geographical location. When I have something to say or share about system administration, I use this category.
We have deployed TLS at a large scale using both hardware and software load balancers. We have found that modern software-based TLS implementations running on commodity CPUs are fast enough to handle heavy HTTPS traffic load without needing to resort to dedicated cryptographic hardware. We serve all of our HTTPS traffic using software running on commodity hardware.
Doug Beaver, Facebook
HTTP2 Expression of Interest
logstash is a tool for managing events and logs. You can use it to collect logs, parse them, and store them for later use (like, for searching). Speaking of searching, logstash comes with a web interface for searching and drilling into all of your logs.
It is fully free and fully open source. The license is Apache 2.0, meaning you are pretty much free to use it however you want in whatever way.
logstash is now a part of the Elasticsearch family!
Pushover – simple notifications for Android, iOS, and Desktop.
Mark McLoughlin has a nice list of thoughts, ideas, and questions to reflect on in regards to the Heartbleed bug.
Six Ways to Make Your Production Logs More Useful
- Log structured data in a readable format
- Add a dash of color
- Logs let your app communicate with you and your team
- Seriously though, don’t put exception stack traces in your logs!
- Log URLs for easy access to more context
- Add emotional context to your logs
Most of these are somewhat expected, but I emotional context in logs was definitely new to me. I wonder why I’ve never even thought of this.