FreeBSD 10.0beta3, SQL Injections, Rust stacks, InfluxDB and Circus renewal – Snippets

Catching up on Codescaling with some of the less mentioned things worth noting…

• FreeBSD 10.0’s latest beta: It’s into the home/RC straight for FreeBSD 10 with the release of the third and hopefully last beta of the development cycle. The original schedule would have seen RC2 available around now, but with a focus on a quality release, there’s been a bit of slippage. Check out this FreeBSD News item from September for a feel of what’s going in. I’m looking forward to the switch to LLVM/Clang and seeing how the tickless kernel works out.

• SQL injection attacks by Google?: Sucuri have come across an odd thing, Google doing SQL Injection attacks. Basically, Google’s bots crawl a site with links which would carry out an SQLi attack if followed… and then follow them like the bots they are which carries out the attack. Google may want to add at least some filtering to their bots in future, but its something to remind any application that ingests URLs from the web to follow them that URLs are not necessarily passive.

• Rust reworks stack plan: For those interested in the implementation of languages, the Rust developers have decided to drop segmented stacks. Segmented stacks were stacks that were allocated small and expanded as needed. This would have allowed threads to have a much smaller footprint, but it didn’t quite work out that way. Followups on the thread discuss the cost of memory, both having it and accessing it, and alternative strategies.

• InfluxDB: Databases for time series data are in and the latest open source addition to the game is InfluxDB which prides itself in no external dependencies. The Go-based MIT-licensed code has a JSONic HTTP API, an SQLish query language and a playground server to get running with. Its early days for InfluxDB, but its off to a good start.

• Mozilla’s Circus Renewed: Mozilla’s Services project has announced a new version of its process/socket manager called Circus. Built using Python and ZeroMQ and recently redeveloped to be Python 3 compatible and fully asynchronous, the software lets an administrator manage processes and sockets on servers through a command line, Python API or web console. You can find the code on mozilla-services github.