TL;DR Applying some Bash knowhow on exit codes, you can cut down the time required for a Terraform apply if no changes are to be done. The Simple Plan and Apply Over the past couple of weeks, I’d been working on getting our alerts deployed with Terraform. The initial proof of concept was a very simple shell script with a lot of copy-paste to handle the many accounts, environments and regions that I work on.

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.

Couple of months ago, just about a month before #cpgweds - the engagement my Envy 14 laptop started showing signs of dying - weird noises coming from the vents, system freezing arbitrarily, system getting incredibly hot - and that’s really unusual because the Envy’s cooling system is probably one of the best that I’ve seen in a laptop. Soon enough, it became clear that a fan was not working - my idle temperatures hit 85 degrees C, and start any game or even xbmc, and the temperatures would hit 95-100 and shutdown sooner or later.

I love Unity, especially the lens feature. While going through the Ubuntu store, found this neat little lens for initiating an SSH connection. The lens parses your ~/.ssh/known_hosts & ~/.ssh/config files and provides you with a list of servers that you can connect to. Just install the lens, logout & login back to your desktop and you're good to go. To search, just bring up Unity dash by hitting the Super (aka Windows) key, type either the username or host and just hit enter to initiate the connection.

Going through Ask Ubuntu, found a nice answer on keyboard shortcuts for Ubuntu Unity. Now if that’s too much for you to remember, Octavian Damiean has created this sweet wallpaper with the shortcuts and gestures overlayed on it. Click on the above image for a full size version, or a here’s a SVG version if you prefer the same.