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Ask HN: Old Unix technologies like cron and SSE in modern workflows?

5 points by hilti 15 hours ago | 4 comments

I've been in the industry for over a decade and find myself repeatedly returning to battle-tested UNIX technologies despite the constant stream of new frameworks and tools.

Cron jobs still power critical scheduled tasks across our infrastructure. Server Sent Events handle real-time updates more efficiently than many WebSocket implementations I've tried. Shell scripts glue together components that modern architectures claim to integrate seamlessly.

I'm curious how others are leveraging these older technologies in modern stacks. Have you found creative uses for old UNIX tools that outperform newer alternatives? Are there specific combinations of old + new that work particularly well? Any war stories where a simple UNIX solution saved the day when modern tools failed?

bookwormtrixie 14 hours ago

I cannot say it is battle tested since I use it for personal use only. libvirt with serial console for VMs and netboot for Linux installation (I am not fully netbooting, since I am use netboot.xyz ISO since it is faster than provisioning proper DHCP+TFTP server or setting up a netboot in VM's UEFI). It makes everything much much faster and more comfortable, almost every Linux distro installer works properly over serial (except RH, CentOS and Fedora which say that few options are unavailable in TUI mode). The only think that is needed to be done to make it works is just to provide a kernel option for serial output (console=ttyS0,115200n81).

When I was using RPi more intensively I was using serial (UART) connection as well. No need to switch keyboard, mouse and monitor in case of failed boot or broken network connection. I was just opening serial console on my desktop and possibility of having terminal with Linux on RPi and web browser on one screen, as well as possibility of copying text between two windows was making Linux boot debugging more comfortable.

ciaovietnam 13 hours ago

I use SSE to send web users to another page (redirection header) while still processing other long running stuff for them. The result: non-blocking web access, users dont have to wait for all stuff processed to see a confirmation message e.g: a user signs up, you can show them their account has been created instantly while still creating relevant services (e.g: a virtual server) for their account.

sejje 14 hours ago

cron jobs are great

tmux + vim > ide (for me)

ssh > rdp

git

terminal

This stuff is so old now, and largely does one thing and does it well. I prefer composing unix tools to writing my own scripts, when it's possible. When I do write my own scripts, often they need to be run from a cron job, soooooo...

<3 old tech

bookwormtrixie 14 hours ago

Tmux(2007) and Git(2005) are not so old, especially comparing to last Unix workstation which were released at a similar time :D

SSH - great tool, even Microsoft adopted it