Tips & How-To's

I dig into AWS CLI a little bit to explain how we can use JMESPath expressions to apply client-side and server-side filtering and bulk tag instances of an Auto Scaling Group.

I’ve been using hostname spoofing with curl for a while and I find out why hostname spoofing doesn’t work with TLS.

Here’s how you can get the goodness of fuzzy search in your PowerShell terminal with fzf.

This post explains Terraform’s exit codes in detail and how you can use them to skip a terraform apply when no changes are needed.

I started blogging with WordPress about 13 years ago. I had some free time since the joining date for my first job was about a month or so away. Armed with boredom, an Internet connection and an ample amount of free time, I started Sathya Says on WordPress.com hosting. Soon after, I came to know about domains, shared hosting and self-hosted WordPress and with my first ever salary, purchased sathyasays.com, shared hosting and started writing about Linux experiences.

Long time, no write! Newsletters have become all the rage these days and I guess for good reason - they’re curated, come in (usually) once a week and typically offer a respite from the deluge of news that comes in why typical RSS Feeds or via Twitter. Naturally I subscribed to few initially and then the list of newsletters increased - and now I am stuck with a newsletter bomb in my Inbox

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 lvscan was able to see the increased space). This time I tried a different approach:

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 directory and the unicorn invoke script. Was trying to figure out why unicorn wasn’t starting up, till I read a bit more and dropped to using echo to understand what’s happening

For every Barcamp event that comes and goes by, I try to think of what new thing I can do to make it a bit better. Off late, I’ve been using Inbox by Gmail almost exclusively. I love the product, particularly for the cards that show up that gives you a brief info about the mail(ex: Event reservation details/Flight details etc) without even opening the email. I noticed that Meetup does the same.

With the next Barcamp Bangalore looming round the corner, I’d pitched in to help with some of the website tasks. I installed the traditional WAMP stack with WAMP Server for Windows and started working with WordPress. Needed to get the email notifications working, saw that it wasn’t. Bit of research & found that I’d need a SMTP server or an equivalent of sendmail. All the cool kids seem to be using Fake sendmail - I tried it to use with Gmail’s SMTP servers which uses authentication & TLS.