If you’ve been in the container game for a while, you’ve probably seen a lot of buzz around “distroless” containers. The first time I heard the term, I pictured a container floating off into the void - no OS, no shell, just… code. Turns out, that’s not too far from the truth, but just like Serverless, Distroless is a misleading term!

Let’s break down what distroless containers are, why you might want them in your stack, what they’re great at (and not-so-great at), plus how to actually debug one.

I’m happy to announce a simple yet effective command-line DNS benchmarking tool I’ve recently developed: dns-benchmark. This project was directly inspired by the outstanding work of Steve Gibson and his well-known DNS Benchmark utility. Steve’s meticulous attention to detail in benchmarking DNS performance motivated me to create something similar, but tailored specifically for the command line.

This CLI tool, written in Go, allows individual users to quickly test and compare various recursive DNS servers, checking key metrics such as latency, reliability, DNSSEC validation, and even response correctness—like detecting servers that hijack NXDOMAIN responses.

As infrastructure engineers, we often find ourselves bridging gaps between the tools we use and the monitoring systems we rely on. When I’ve migrated to Prometheus and Grafana on one of the sites, integrating Accel-PPP posed a unique challenge. The absence of native Prometheus support for Accel-PPP meant I was stuck with an SNMP-based monitoring setup, but relying on SNMP for metrics felt like patching a modern system with legacy tools—inefficient and less than ideal. Additionally Accel-PPP lacks any API or interface to get information about its state. This led me to develop accel-exporter.

Over my two decades as an infrastructure engineer, I’ve watched our field transform dramatically. What began with manual server configuration has evolved into defining entire organizations infrastructure as code. This journey reflects not just technological change, but a complete shift in how we approach managing systems at scale. I’ve been in the trenches through most of it, and I want to share my story of this evolution with fellow infrastructure engineers who’ve lived through similar transitions.

In Unix-like operating systems, dotfile is synonymous with hidden file. Usually used by programs to store configuration variables.

I have multiple machines, which I regularly work on. I keep sync of a set of personalized dotfiles between them – customized settings for programs that I’m using, like many of you. Till now, I was using my private git repository for things like my private scripts, Mutt, Irssi, Ekg2 or Tmux configurations. On the other hand some I keep publicly available for others i.e. on GitHub like Vim configs. And oh boy, there are so many of them! The true is, I customize almost everything that I’m using including simple tools like cp (just to get progress bar or interactivity).

Back in 1994, a new Internet Protocol was in the works - Internet Protocol next generation (IPng) - which eventually became IPv6. The goal was to have it up and running by 1996, with the idea that by the time IPv4 addresses ran out, everyone would already be using IPv6. Well… that didn’t quite go as planned. As of last year (2012), global adoption of IPv6 only just hit 1%.