VSHN.timer #36: /dev/random

Welcome to another VSHN.timer! Every Monday, 5 links related to Kubernetes, OpenShift, CI / CD, and DevOps; all stuff coming out of our own chat system, making us think, laugh, or simply work better.
This week we’re going to mashup a quick bric-à-brac of stuff we found online. Maybe there’s a hidden theme across all these links?
1. Do you know what is the Maximum Transmission Unit in a standard Ethernet network? 1500 bytes. Wait, isn’t it a power of 2? Ben Cox explains the whole story behind that number, telling a story of economics, politics, and standards, and showing how it affects the efficiency of today’s Internet. We still struggle to find out WTF is our IP address, though.
https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/why-is-ethernet-mtu-1500
2. Distributed systems require distributed consensus algorithms. Paxos and Raft are quite popular these days. Other examples are ZAB, Blockchain, and DNS. But which of all these is the most widely used, distributed, and cross-platform of them all? Jens Finkhaeuser has a different answer for this question and it will surprise you (or not!)

3. Thinking about making that internal tool an open source project? You might be starting a longer trip than you thought at first. Making your private GitHub repository visible to everyone is just the first step. Matthew Rocklin explains what the other six steps consist of; yup, seven stages in total.

4. The beauty of Unix lies in its philosophy; its wide variety of flavors, its iconic command line, and its infinite flexibility to allow us to solve problems in the most unexpected ways. Of course that variety can be overwhelming sometimes; the Rosetta Stone for Unix is a fantastic map to find your way from BSD to macOS to Solaris to Linux and beyond. HP-UX, anyone?
http://bhami.com/rosetta.html
5. The tool of the week is TEXTREME, a text editor that fits perfectly with your noisy hacker keyboard (blue switches FTW!) and with the current “work from home” theme. Pump up the volume and write that blog post! Well, until your significant other or your neighbor complain about the noise.
https://le-von.itch.io/textreme
So, what do you think? Can you spot the hidden theme across these links? Would you like to share some more random stuff with the community? Get in touch with us through the form at the bottom of this page, and see you next week for another edition of VSHN.timer.