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Convert newsletters to RSS feeds with Kill-The-Newsletter
· ☕ 1 min read · ✍️ Sathyajith Bhat
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
A Brief Look at the Oculus Rift
A Brief Look at the Oculus Rift
· ☕ 6 min read · ✍️ Sathyajith Bhat
VR and me go like chalk and cheese - ever since a kid, I’ve had motion sickness which limited me from playing most FPS games and my last attempt at VR(at IGX 2016) was a disaster - I barely could withstand 30 seconds of VR. Granted the game selection was bad - for me anyway (Driveclub on PSVR) - still I didn’t expect that bad of a reaction. With that bit of context, the reactions that flew in when I told the folks that I(well Jo, my wife, to be more precise) bought the Rift was expected.
Accessing Chef Databag Items from within attributes
· ☕ 1 min read · ✍️ Sathyajith Bhat
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 to search and fetch databag and databag items from within a recipe: For ex to fetch a databag called admins, it’s as easy as:
Of nginx’s mid cut off responses and proxy buffers
· ☕ 3 min read · ✍️ Sathyajith Bhat
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 which is then served using Rails API via nginx which acts as the reverse proxy.
Xenserver and adding/attaching a new storage to a VM
· ☕ 2 min read · ✍️ Sathyajith Bhat
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:
Gaming Report for 2016
Gaming Report for 2016
· ☕ 1 min read · ✍️ Sathyajith Bhat
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 did a pretty decent in accomplishing this. So here’s my summary Games finished this year: PC:
Statutory warning: Decimals in your logrotate config can be bad for your server’s disk space
· ☕ 2 min read · ✍️ Sathyajith Bhat
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 the server to investigate. Running a df -h indicated as expected the disk space in use was over 70% (which is the trigger for sensu to send a notification) and the log files had grown way over expected size.
Broken KDE Plasma 5.6 on Linux Mint 18
· ☕ 3 min read · ✍️ Sathyajith Bhat
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 my Lenovo E41-80(which comes with Skylake chipset), I stuck to it with the Cinnamon desktop.
Chef Zero, Cookbooks and Data Bags locations
· ☕ 2 min read · ✍️ Sathyajith Bhat
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 went and RTFM couple of times, no dice. Then I decided to not skim read and read the entire thing.
DevOps Diaries: When Terminator terminates your MySQL imports onto an AWS Instance…
· ☕ 3 min read · ✍️ Sathyajith Bhat
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 screen panes). Few days back we were preparing for a big migration & deploy and I was tasked upon to prepare a failover just in case the migration goes wrong.