• 2 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • To explain how HAproxy and competing tools solve this:

    Two servers are prepared to be the single reverse proxy, but one is active. They constantly communicate with a “heartbeat”. When the active one fails to send a heartbeat, the secondary executes the steps to become the active primary. When the primary’s heart starts beating again, it becomes active again.

    So there can be a few seconds of downtime, but the failover is automatic.







  • Part of the app resides on the GitHub infrastructure, where GitHub stores, processes and displays results. So their costs are not zero.

    But GitHub could take a “tax the rich” approach to pricing by charging enterprise customers more for self-hostingand leave it free for others.

    A lot of open source is funded like that— most funding for a project comes from a very few companies and everything else uses it free or for very low donations or costs.












  • The encoding format of URLs is URL encoding, also known as percent-encoding. Content in the URL may be first encoding in some other format, like JSON or base64, and then encoded additionally using percent-encoding.

    While there is a standard way to decode percent-encoding, websites are free to use base64 or JSON in URLs however they wish, so there’s not a one-size-fits-all way to decode them all. For example, the “/” character is valid in both percent-encoding and base64-encoding, so to know if it’s part of a base64-encoded blob or not, you might end up trying decoding several parts of the URL as base64 and checking if the result looks like URL-- essentially brute force.

    A smarter way to do this might be to maintain a mapping between your favorite sites that you want to decode and what methods they use to encode links. Then a tool could efficiently directly decode the URLs embedded in these click trackers.


  • Lol. After professionally hosting email for 15 years I’m happy to let someone else handle it now.

    About 90% of incoming mail will be spam and it will be your job to make sure you are doing good job of classifying it so you don’t get junk in your inbox and don’t lose real mail in the spam folder.

    Then for outgoing mail you need to make sure SPF, DKIM and DMARC are all in order.

    Then there is all the usual stuff of security updates, backups, monitoring, alerting, logging and having a plan for internet outages.

    Yes, it’s all doable but I won’t expect it be “set and forget”. I expect there will be quite a bit of tuning with some possible spam and delivery problems while you get kinks worked out.