My thoughts on Tech
In Chef parlance, databags are global variables saved in JSON format and are stored and accessible on the Chef server. Given that these are indexed and can be searched up along with the fact that they can be encrypted make them ideal candidates to store secrets such as credentials/ssh keys. Chef provides an easy way…
Among the services I look after, the biggest and high-profile – is the user facing website. The website is your bog-standard typical frontend(powered by Express/Angular) which fetches data via an API which is powered by the backend(built on Rails). Typical flow is that Express receives the request from the browser, makes a request to the backend…
I had an instance today where a local VM(which is provisioned by Xenserver) was running low on disk space and wanted to increase the disk space allocated to it. Last time when I did it by increasing the space from within Xen Manager, I failed miserably(the VM was configured with LVM and neither pvscan or…
End of the year is here and while other services are busy sending Year in 2016 report, there sparked a mini gaming report in our telegram group and I decided to compile my gaming in 2016 report. At the start of the year I had decided to finish more games this year and I guess I…
Last night as I was about to head to sleep, Sensu started emailing me about disk space warnings on one of the backend servers. That’s strange, I thought. I had set up logrotate with appropriate limits to ensure the log file size is reasonable and rotation happens on a daily basis. Curious, I ssh’d into…
I’ve been a long time KDE user, loved the KDE 4.0 SC when it first arrived and probably one of the most vocal supporters for it when people were hating it. Since my recent job move, I’ve been using Linux desktop full-time. Since Linux Mint 18 was the only distro which supported WiFi/Display/Multi-monitor/HDMI out on…
I like chef-zero a lot. There’s so much overlap between chef’s products: chef-zero, chef-solo, chef-apply – yes, each have their own uses, but I digress. Chef-zero has been relatively pain-free for me – except when I tried to get it running – trying to figure out why it wasn’t fetching the cookbooks was so annoying!…
I have begun to use Terminator quite a lot. Terminator’s quite handy when you want to connect to multiple servers on a single terminal thanks to its split pane feature. (And yes I know about tmux & screen – I have screen on my servers, don’t want to get into the headache that is nested…
Since my new job involves lot more of Linux, shell scripting bash and automation, I’ve been trying to brush up my Linux skills. Ran into this “problem” today where there’s an init script which handles unicorn start/stop/reload and we were debugging some kinks around this. The init script had a chain of cd to the…
Transistor is the second game made by Supergiant Games following up on their previous game, Bastion. Bastion didn’t hold my attention long enough so I really can’t say much about it, except at first glance, Bastion seemed to have great artwork and music. Story Transistor follows the story of Red, a singer in a city called Cloudbank…