[Discuss] Port Scanning

[markw at mohawksoft.com]

> On Fri, 9 Aug 2024 18:07:27 -0400
> markw at mohawksoft.com wrote:
>
>> There was no failure, it was nothing more than constantly evolving
>> technology adjusting to new realities.
>
> This.
>
> I've ranted about how ShareLaTeX, now Overleaf(?), abuses containers to
> distribute garbage code. Here are some counter-examples that I use
> daily.

[snip]

Hate the player, not the game :-)

The basic container system in Linux is LXC. All the other containers
systems spring from it. I don't think docker uses it anymore, but it used
to. Docker certainly uses the same kernel facilities that LXC uses.

I HATE docker, its a mess. I hate Kubernetes because it is a big bloated
management environment for Docker. I have been using "podman" which is a
container environment that can use docker containers without the docker
process and security vulnerabilities.

LXC with name spaces, layered file systems, network isolation, cgroups,
user ids, etc. Provide a very good strategy for layering container file
systems.

An overlay file system is the key to a read-only OS file system. There is
a notion of "lower" "upper" and "merged." The "lower" file system is your
read-only OS. The "upper" file system is everything you want added or
changed to the read-only OS layer, and the "merged" is the overlay. When
you open a file, say /usr/shar/fubar. The "upper" file system is searched,
then the "upper" file system. The "merged" file system view's the "lower"
file system through the "upper" file system.


There was/is an option on Raspbian to use an overlay FS on the SD card (as
"lower") and have the "upper" a ramdisk. That way you don't write to the
SD card and thus extend its life. This is kind of what MacOS is doing.
There's no reason why it wouldn't be fairly trivial to do with desktop or
server Linux.

I think there will be a consolodated "winner" in the app container space.