I turned 44 today. It's been a great year all round. It's been a year of focus on trifold - family, work, and self. I am pretty happy about turning 44; it is just another number this time.
Here is my graph for the current year. It's a bit different than last year.
The post 44 first appeared on Thejesh GN.
I returned from Valparai on Saturday. It was a fun and memorable ride. I also did a bit of OSM mapping while I was there.
The post Weekly Notes 41/2024 first appeared on Thejesh GN.
I wanted to ride again to Valparai to note how different it feels from 2008. I remembered riding in the rain through clouds and green tea estates and how beautiful it was. I had forgotten its details. I also remember it as one of the longest ones we did until then. So I thought it would be great to ride again to see what has changed and if Valparai is as pretty as I think.
It was just me on CB350 and Manju on his HD this time. We also planned to take a different route rather than the standard highway. We left on 3rd October at around 6 AM. The route was Electronics City - NICE Road - Kanakapura - Malavalli - Kollegala - Chamarajanagara - Satyamangala - Annur - Pollachi and Valparai. There wasn't much traffic, the ride was smooth, and the views were pretty. It was a good choice. I loved the ride through the Satyamangalam forest and the Dhimbam Ghats. Dhimbam Ghat road is about 14 Kilometers with 27 hairpin bends. It is beautiful and fun to ride. We reached Bannari RTO to ensure riding a yellow board Karnataka registered 2WL in Tamil Nadu is OK. Apparently, you do not need to do anything, though I am still unsure even after the RTO officer at Bannri assured me it's OK :)
By about 5:30 PM, we reached Valparai hairband curves. From there, we rode slowly, as it was very, very beautiful. We took lots of breaks. Manju remebered more than me. I did remember a few things after he reminded me. At one point, we rode through a cloud. We reached Valparai by dusk. It took us some time to find the Annamalai Club, where we stayed, thanks to a friend. I did add the accurate location of the Annamalai Club to OSM. The weather was great the whole day except for a bit near Coimbatore bypass.
The second day was a slow day. We visited the town and went around the tea estates. Then we visited a couple of water dams and a waterfall. There weren't many people, so it was good. The waterfall was fun.
We left around 7 AM on Saturday. Again, we took lots of time to ride down the hills. This time, I wanted to shoot some videos on my GO2. I had it attached to my jacket, so I was very cautious. We also encountered a couple of radio-tagged mountain goats on the way. The ride was beautiful. Also, the fact that Manju and I could talk on an intercom made it enjoyable.
We took the highway for the most part. We skipped the highway between Salem and Dharmapuri (We took Mettur road). We took a picture at Mettur dam like last time. The weather was fantastic all the way. The air became much cooler as we reached Dharmapuri. Then, we saw some wet patches on the road as we approached Krishnagiri. We thought we had escaped the rain. But to be safe, covered the luggage in waterproof covers.
As we reached Bommasandra, we were hit by massive rain. Thankfully, we were near an unopened metro station. We took coverage. We waited for two hours for the rain and traffic to reduce. I started again at 8:45 and reached by 10 PM. Traffic was OK, but I got hit by rain again close to MG Road. I came home thoroughly drenched. How can there be a ride to Valparai without that?
&&I reached Valparai yesterday with Manju. This ride is probably going to be the last ride for the year. Not bad for the year I restarted, isn't it? I will write about the ride in detail once I reach Bangalore. For now, I can only say Valparai is as beautiful as it was 15 years back, though a bit more commercial than then. It's still very pretty and still a lovely ride.
The post Weekly Notes 40/2024 first appeared on Thejesh GN.
I generated this podcast a week back using Google's NotebookLM based on my Twenty Years of Engineering Practice blog post. Before I publish it here, I wanted to check what my friends and colleagues thought about it. Most thought it was an actual podcast discussing my article. They also thought it had a standard flow; once, I told them it was generated by a model. Some were surprised, and others found patterns that match most conversation-based (and not original content) on existing content-type podcasts.
I thought the quality was okay; you could identify the patterns once you know a model generated it, but it is very tough to figure out if you don't. It can be helpful if you don't have the option to read or listen to the original article. It kind of works like a summary in the form of a conversation where AI hosts are faking certain things to make it enjoyable.
In India, how it will get used on WhatsApp is left to your imagination. We already have videos with commentary with foreign accents to make them look authentic or newsworthy. We will have to see how this tech will get used in that context. The next elections in India will be filled with fake videos and audio, not just messages. Imagine the kind of myth-busting tools we need.
What do you think?
The post AI Generated Podcast first appeared on Thejesh GN.
Last month, I traveled to Kenya to attend a conference called State of the Map 2024 (“SotM” for short), which is an annual meetup of OpenStreetMap contributors from all over the world. It was held at the University of Nairobi Towers in Nairobi, from the 6th to the 8th of September.
I have been contributing to OpenStreetMap for the last three years, and this conference seemed like a great opportunity to network with others in the community. As soon as I came across the travel grant announcement, I jumped in and filled the form immediately. I was elated when I was selected for the grant and couldn’t wait to attend. The grant had an upper limit of €1200 and covered food, accommodation, travel and miscellaneous expenses such as visa fee.
Pre-travel tasks included obtaining Kenya’s eTA and getting a yellow fever vaccine. Before the conference, Mikko from the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team introduced me to Rabina and Pragya from Nepal, Ibtehal from Bangladesh, and Sajeevini from Sri Lanka. We all booked the Nairobi Transit Hotel, which was within walking distance of the conference venue. Pragya, Rabina, and I traveled together from Delhi to Nairobi, while Ibtehal was my roommate in the hotel.
The venue, University of Nairobi Towers, was a tall building and the conference was held on the fourth, fifth and sixth floors. The open area on the fifth floor of the building had a nice view of Nairobi’s skyline and was a perfect spot for taking pictures. Interestingly, the university had a wing dedicated to Mahatma Gandhi, who is regarded in India as the Father of the Nation.
The diversity of the participants was mind-blowing, with people coming from a whopping 54 countries. I was surprised to notice that I was the only participant traveling from India, despite India having a large OpenStreetMap community. That said, there were two other Indian participants who traveled from other countries. I finally got to meet Arnalie (from the Phillipines) and Letwin (from Zimbabwe), both of whom I had only met online before. I had met Anisa (from Albania) earlier during DebConf 2023. But I missed Mikko and Honey from the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, whom I knew from the Open Mapping Guru program.
I learned about the extent of OSM use through Pragya and Rabina’s talk; about the logistics of running the OSM Board, in the OSMF (OpenStreetMap Foundation) session; about the Youth Mappers from Sajeevini, about the OSM activities in Malawi from Priscilla Kapolo, and about mapping in Zimbabwe from Letwin. However, I missed Ibtehal’s lightning session. The ratio of women speakers and participants at the conference was impressive, and I hope we can get such gender representation in our Delhi/NCR mapping parties.
Outside of talks, the conference also had lunch and snack breaks, giving ample time for networking with others. In the food department, there were many options for a lacto-ovo vegetarian like myself, including potatoes, rice, beans, chips etc. I found out that the milk tea in Kenya (referred to as “white tea”) is usually not as strong compared to India, so I switched to coffee (which is also called “white coffee” when taken with milk). The food wasn’t spicy, but I can’t complain :) Fruit juices served as a nice addition to lunch.
At the end of the second day of the conference, there was a surprise in store for us — a bus ride to the Bao Box restaurant. The ride gave us the experience of a typical Kenyan matatu (privately-owned minibuses used as share taxis), complete with loud rap music. I remember one of the songs being Kraff’s Nursery Rhymes. That day, I was wearing an original Kenyan cricket jersey - one that belonged to Dominic Wesonga, who represented Kenya in four ODIs. This confused Priscilla Kapolo, who asked if I was from Kenya! Anyway, while it served as a good conversation starter, it didn’t attract as much attention as I expected :) I had some pizza and chips there, and later some drinks with Ibtehal. After the party, Piyush went with us to our hotel and we played a few games of UNO.
I am grateful to the organizers Laura and Dorothea for introducing me to Nikhil when I was searching for a companion for my post-conference trip. Nikhil was one of the aforementioned Indian participants, and a wildlife lover. We had some nice conversations; he wanted to go to the Masai Maara Natural Reserve, but it was too expensive for me. In addition, all the safaris were multi-day affairs, and I wasn’t keen on being around wildlife for that long. Eventually I chose to go my own way, exploring the coastal side and visiting Mombasa.
While most of the work regarding the conference was done using free software (including the reimbursement form and Mastodon announcements), I was disappointed by the use of WhatsApp for coordination with the participants. I don’t use WhatsApp and so was left out. WhatsApp is proprietary software (they do not provide the source code) and users don’t control it. It is common to highlight that OpenStreetMap is controlled by users and the community, rather than a company - this should apply to WhatsApp as well.
My suggestion is to use XMPP, which shares similar principles with OpenStreetMap, as it is privacy-respecting, controlled by users, and powered by free software. I understand the concern that there might not be many participants using XMPP already. Although it is a good idea to onboard people to free software like XMPP, we can also create a Matrix group, and bridge it with both the XMPP group and the Telegram group. In fact, using Matrix and bridging it with Telegram is how I communicated with the South Asian participants. While it’s not ideal - as Telegram’s servers are proprietary and centralized - but it’s certainly much better than creating a WhatsApp-only group. The setup can be bridged with IRC as well. On the other hand, self-hosted mailing lists for participants is also a good idea.
Finally, I would like to thank SotM for the generous grant, enabling me to attend this conference, meet the diverse community behind OSM and visit the beautiful country of Kenya. Stay tuned for the blog post on Kenya trip.
Thanks to Sahilister, Contrapunctus, Snehal and Badri for reviewing the draft of this blog post before publishing.
Everyone has recovered. It seemed like a common viral fever that was going around, but it was nothing serious. Luckily, I didn't get sick. Hence, we could handle the situation easily. However, this left a lot of work tasks pending to be picked up this week.
Note: Title changed because its week 39 and not 40. Since cool URLs don't change, URL remains the same. Thank you Mihir.Â
The post Weekly Notes 39/2024 first appeared on Thejesh GN.
Technically, it's not a radio. No radio waves are involved as such. It's a Micro SD Card Player like the cassette tape players we used to have. The name Baby Radio is apt only because it only plays what a baby needs to hear, is controlled by RJ, aka me, and has the surprise factor of a Radio.
Uma loves music. She has been carrying around the Bluetooth speaker like a boombox all around the house. That solution had multiple problems. She keeps losing the Bluetooth connection to player Ruizu when she walks around the house; she drops the speaker often, charging two devices and making sure both have enough power all the time is tough. Invariable one of them won't have power. Managing playlists was becoming problematic as well. She currently has a playlist for the night with white noise, soothing music, etc., and a playlist for the day with rhymes. She might have more in the future.
So, I was looking for
I would have loved to have something like hörbert, but unfortunately, it's not available in India, and it's not affordable either. There are other baby radios that seemed very expensive for what they provide, and also, most didn't suit my content requirements.
So finally, I went for a simple speaker AmazonBasics 5W Bluetooth 5.3 Speaker, which meets all my requirements except for being pretty. It's not bad; Uma likes it. But we will see what we can do to make it look great in the next post. I have ideas.
I had a couple of old slow Micro SD Cards and USB drives. Now I have found a use for them. Each of those physical drives represents a playlist. I have one with night music and one with day music. I plug the required one and click play. And it plays. That's it. That's all there is to it. It currently seems to have good battery life, especially when the volume is less than 50%. I paid Rs.600 for it. Which I think is a very good price.
It's small enough for Uma to carry it everywhere. It is rugged enough that I am not worried about her dropping it. We can easily switch between the playlists by switching cards or USB drives. It's not dependent on our music player or the phone. All in all, it seems to be working well.
But there are things that I do not like
All this would have been useless without good content. I spent a lot of time finding good audio content. This was also my biggest issue with existing products. They come with lot of random stuff which I din't like.
Here are my current sources.
For now, I have enough rhymes to play for two hours. But to be frank, Uma likes a dozen or two at max and keeps repeating them. So, we don't see the need for more. Maybe once she graduates to stories; variety, and quantity will be helpful. Send me your content suggestions. I am especially looking for Kannada and Malayalam ones. English is welcome, too.
The post Baby Radio first appeared on Thejesh GN.
Another one of the ASN list. This turned out longer than I expected (which is good). If you want to briefly understand what is an ASN, my Personal ASNs From India post carries an introduction to it.
Now, here’re the Educational and Research Institutions with their own ASN in India, which I could find:
Special Mentions
Some observations:
Let me know if I’m missing someone.
The weekend was spent at home celebrating pre-onam and onam. The Onam sadhya was great. I published the whole set of Pooklam arranged by Anju this year.
The post Weekly Notes 38/2024 first appeared on Thejesh GN.
19 Sep 2024
I've been sending a lot of password protected files of late, and quite frankly sending passwords for them in plain-text over the email or SMS is shaking my inner paranoid demon.
I'm pretty sure there are lots of services like this, but I'm making one for myself anyway as
The application is called poof. Because, duh!. You can find it running on https://aktsbot.in/poof. Go ahead and try it out!
The source code is over at Github. It uses sqlite and expressjs. And that's it!
Happy Hacking & have a great day!
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Using cached setuptools-75.0.0-py3-none-any.whl (1.2 MB)
Installing collected packages: setuptools
Successfully installed setuptools-75.0.0
~/d/moin-test►moin create-instance --full moin-test 1.457s 00:06
2024-09-16 00:06:36,812 INFO moin.cli.maint.create_instance:76 Directory /home/raj/dev/moin-test already exists, using as wikiconfig dir.
2024-09-16 00:06:36,813 INFO moin.cli.maint.create_instance:93 Instance creation finished.
2024-09-16 00:06:37,303 INFO moin.cli.maint.create_instance:107 Build Instance started.
2024-09-16 00:06:37,304 INFO moin.cli.maint.index:51 Index creation started
2024-09-16 00:06:37,308 INFO moin.cli.maint.index:55 Index creation finished
2024-09-16 00:06:37,308 INFO moin.cli.maint.modify_item:166 Load help started
Item loaded: Home
Item loaded: docbook
Item loaded: mediawiki
Item loaded: OtherTextItems/Diff
Item loaded: WikiDict
Item loaded: moin
Item loaded: moin/subitem
Item loaded: html/SubItem
Item loaded: moin/HighlighterList
Item loaded: MoinWikiMacros/Icons
Item loaded: InclusionForMoinWikiMacros
Item loaded: TemplateSample
Item loaded: MoinWikiMacros
Item loaded: rst/subitem
Item loaded: OtherTextItems/IRC
Item loaded: rst
Item loaded: creole/subitem
Item loaded: Home/subitem
Item loaded: OtherTextItems/CSV
Item loaded: images
Item loaded: Sibling
Item loaded: html
Item loaded: markdown
Item loaded: creole
Item loaded: OtherTextItems
Item loaded: OtherTextItems/Python
Item loaded: docbook/SubItem
Item loaded: OtherTextItems/PlainText
Item loaded: MoinWikiMacros/MonthCalendar
Item loaded: markdown/Subitem
Success: help namespace help-en loaded successfully with 30 items
2024-09-16 00:06:46,258 INFO moin.cli.maint.modify_item:166 Load help started
Item loaded: video.mp4
Item loaded: archive.tar.gz
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Item loaded: archive.zip
Item loaded: logo.png
Item loaded: cat.jpg
Item loaded: logo.svg
Success: help namespace help-common loaded successfully with 7 items
2024-09-16 00:06:49,685 INFO moin.cli.maint.modify_item:338 Load welcome page started
2024-09-16 00:06:49,801 INFO moin.cli.maint.modify_item:347 Load welcome finished
2024-09-16 00:06:49,801 INFO moin.cli.maint.index:124 Index optimization started
2024-09-16 00:06:51,383 INFO moin.cli.maint.index:126 Index optimization finished
2024-09-16 00:06:51,383 INFO moin.cli.maint.create_instance:114 Full instance setup finished.
2024-09-16 00:06:51,383 INFO moin.cli.maint.create_instance:115 You can now use "moin run" to start the builtin server.
~/d/moin-test►ls moin-test 15.295s 00:06
bin/ intermap.txt lib64@ wiki/ wikiconfig.py
include/ lib/ pyvenv.cfg wiki_local/
~/d/moin-test►MOINCFG=wikiconfig.py moin-test 00:07
fish: Unsupported use of '='. In fish, please use 'set MOINCFG wikiconfig.py'.
~/d/moin-test[123]►set MOINCFG wikiconfig.py moin-test 00:07
~/d/moin-test[123]►moin account-create --name test --email test@test.tld --password test123
Password not acceptable: For a password a minimum length of 8 characters is required.
2024-09-16 00:08:19,106 WARNING moin.utils.clock:53 These timers have not been stopped: total
~/d/moin-test►moin account-create --name test --email test@test.tld --password this-is-a-password
2024-09-16 00:08:43,798 INFO moin.cli.account.create:49 User c3608cafec184bd6a7a1d69d83109ad0 ['test'] test@test.tld - created.
2024-09-16 00:08:43,798 WARNING moin.utils.clock:53 These timers have not been stopped: total
~/d/moin-test►moin run --host 0.0.0.0 --port 5000 --no-debugger --no-reload
* Debug mode: off
2024-09-16 00:09:26,146 INFO werkzeug:97 WARNING: This is a development server. Do not use it in a production deployment. Use a production WSGI server instead.
* Running on all addresses (0.0.0.0)
* Running on http://127.0.0.1:5000
* Running on http://192.168.1.2:5000
2024-09-16 00:09:26,146 INFO werkzeug:97 Press CTRL+C to quit
CUPS, Common Unix Printing System manages printing services on linux. Cups uses IPP( Internet Printing Protocol) for managing print jobs. Cups also provides web interface, command line interface to manage printer and print jobs.
I wanted to setup a print server at home on a raspberry pi under local network, instead of connecting the usb to my laptop everytime which is annoying. I have a HP Laserjet M1136 Professional Pro printer at home which requires propreitary drivers to be installed on linux,my printer is not listed in openprinting.
hplip, a utility for hp printers to install drivers and setup the printer on the machine.
Install hplip on raspberry pi,
sudo apt install hpliphplip depends on cups, not needed to install it externally.
Due to disabled root access issue root password fails, switch to root user using sudo su, and run hp-plugin to download all the proprietary plugins
root@raspberrypi:/home/vinay# hp-plugin
HP Linux Imaging and Printing System (ver. 3.22.10)
Plugin Download and Install Utility ver. 2.1
------------------------------------------
| PLUG-IN INSTALLATION FOR HPLIP 3.22.10 |
------------------------------------------
Option Description
---------- --------------------------------------------------
d Download plug-in from HP (recommended)
p Specify a path to the plug-in (advanced)
q Quit hp-plugin (skip installation)
Enter option (d=download*, p=specify path, q=quit) ? dEnter option d to download the required plugin for the printer
Do you accept the license terms for the plug-in (y=yes*, n=no, q=quit) ? yInput y to accept terms and conditions
Exit the sudo su terminal session and run hp-setup -i as a normal user.
$hp-setup -i
HP Linux Imaging and Printing System (ver. 3.22.10)
Printer/Fax Setup Utility ver. 9.0
Copyright (c) 2001-18 HP Development Company, LP
This software comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
This is free software, and you are welcome to distribute it
under certain conditions. See COPYING file for more details.
(Note: Defaults for each question are maked with a '*'. Press <enter> to accept the default.)
--------------------------------
| SELECT CONNECTION (I/O) TYPE |
--------------------------------
Num Connection Description
Type
-------- ---------- ----------------------------------------------------------
0* usb Universal Serial Bus (USB)
1 net Network/Ethernet/Wireless (direct connection or JetDirect)
Enter number 0...1 for connection type (q=quit, enter=usb*) ? 0
Using connection type: usb
Setting up device: hp:/usb/HP_LaserJet_Professional_M1136_MFP?serial=000000000QHBYPM0PR1aI have my printer connected to Pi via USB, so choosing 0
$ sudo usermod -aG lpadmin <<USER>>
$ sudo cupsctl --remote-any
$ sudo /etc/init.d/cups restartAdd the user to lpadmin and enabling remote printing within the network using cupsctl.
https://192.168.1.100:631/admin/ cups web interface
Select HP Laserjet Pro M1136 connected via USB, and then input the root password of raspberrypi.
Printer added successfully, you can now manage print jobs via UI also add printers.
Now my sister and dad can print documents from phone too (:
DebConf24 was held in Busan, South Korea, from July 28th to August 4th 2024 and preceded by DebCamp from July 21st to July 27th. This was my second IRL DebConf (DC) and fourth one in total. I started in Debian with a DebConf, so its always an occasion when one happens.
This year again, I worked in fundraising team, working to raise funds from International sponsors. We did manage to raise good enough funding, albeit less than budgeted. Though, the local Korean team was able to connect and gather many Governmental sponsors, which was quite surprising for me.
I wasn’t seriously considering attending DebConf until I discussed this with Nilesh. More or less, his efforts helped push me through the whole process. Thanks, Nilesh, for this. In March, I got my passport and started preparing documents for South Korean visa. It did require quite a lot of paper work but seeing South Korea’s’s fresh passport visa rejection rate, I had doubts about visa acceptance. The visa finally got approved, which could be attributed to great documentation and help from DebConf visa team. This was also my first trip outside India, and this being to DebConf made many things easy. Most stuff were documented on DebConf website and wiki. Asking some query got immediate responses from someone in the DebConf channels.
We then booked a direct flight from Delhi, reaching Seoul in the morning. With good directions from Sourab TK who had reached Seoul a few hours earlier, we quickly got Korean Won, local SIM and T Money card (transportation card) and headed towards Seoul by AREX, airport metro. We spent the next two days exploring Seoul, which is huge. It probably has the highest number of skyscrapers I have ever seen. The city has a good mix of modern and ancient culture. We explored various places in Seoul including Gyeongbokgung Palace, Statue of King Sejong, Bukchon Hanok village, N Seoul Tower and various food markets which were amazing.
Next, we headed to Busan for DebConf using KTX (Korean high speed rail). (Fun fact, slogan for City of Busan is “Busan is Good”.) South Korea has a good network of frequently running high speed trains. We had pre-booked our tickets because, despite the frequency, trains were sold out most of the time. KTX ride was quite smooth, despite travelling at 300 Kmph at times through Korean countryside and long mountain tunnels.
The venue for DebConf was Pukyong National University (PKNU), Daeyeon Campus. PKNU had two campuses in the Busan and some folks ended up in wrong campus too. With good help and guidance from the front desk, we got our dormitory rooms assigned. Dorms here were quite different, ie:
Settling in was easy. We started meeting familiar folks after almost a year. The long conversations started again. Everyone was excited for DebConf.
Like everytime, the first day was full of action (and chaos). Meet and greet, volunteers check in, video team running around and fixing stuff and things working (or not). There were some interesting talks and sponsors stalls. After day one, things more or less settled down. I again volunteered for video team stuff and helped in camera operations and talk directions, which is always fun. As the tradition applies, saw few talks live on stream too sitting in the dorm room during the conf, which is always fun, when too tired to get ready and go out.
DebConf takes care of food needs for vegan/vegetarianism folks well, of which I’m one. I got to try different food items, which was quite an experience. Tried using chopsticks again which didn’t work, which I later figured that handling metal ones were more difficult. We had late night ramens and wooden chopsticks worked perfectly. One of the days, we even went out to an Indian restaurant to have some desi aloo paratha, paneer dishes, samosas and chai (milk tea). I wasn’t particularly craving desi food but wasn’t able to get something according to my taste so went there.
For day trip, I went to Ulsan. San means mountains in Korean. Ulsan is a port city with many industries including Hyundai car factory, petrochemical industry, paint industry, ship building etc. We saw bamboo forest, Ulsan tower (quite a view towards Ulsan port), whale village, Ulsan Onggi Museum and the sea (which was beautiful).
Amongst the sponsors, I was most interested in our network sponsors, folks who were National research and education networks (NREN) here. We had two network sponsors, KOREN and KREONET, thanks to efforts by local team. Initially it was discussed that they’ll provide 20G uplink each, so 40G in total, which was whopping but by the time the closing talk happened, we got to know we had 200G uplink to the Internet. This was a massive update to last year when we had 1G main and 100M backup link. 200G wasn’t what is required, but it was massive capacity and IIRC from the talk, we peaked at around 500M in usage, but it’s always fun to have astronomical amount of bandwidth for bragging rights ;)
Now let’s talk about things I found interesting about South Korea in general:
If one has to get the whole DebConf experience, it’s better to attend DebCamp as well because that’s when you can sit and interact with everyone better. As DebConf starts, everyone gets busy in various talks and events and things take a pace. DebConf days literally fly. This year, attending DebConf in person was a different experience. Attending DebConf without any organizational work/stress so was better, and I was able to understand working of different Debian team and workflows better while also identified a few where I would like to join and help. A general conclusion was that almost all Debian teams needs more folks to help out. So if someone want to join, they can probably reach out to the team, and would be able to onboard new folks. Though this would require some patience. Kudos to the Korean team who were able to pull off this event under this tight timeline and thanks for all the hospitality.
This whole experience expanded my world view. There’s so much to see and explore and understand. Looking forward to DebConf25 in Brest, France.
PS - Shoutout to abbyck (aka hamCK)!
Vienna - the capital of Austria - is one of the most visited cities in the world, popular for its rich history, gardens, and cafes, along with well-known artists like Beethoven, Mozart, Gödel, and Freud. It has also been consistently ranked as the most livable city in the world.
For these reasons, I was elated when my friend Snehal invited me last year to visit Vienna for a few days. We included Christmas and New Year’s Eve in my itinerary due to the city’s popular Christmas markets and lively events. The festive season also ensured that Snehal had some days off for sightseeing.
Indians require a visa to visit Austria. Since the travel dates were near, I rushed to book an appointment online with VFS Global in Delhi, and quickly arranged the required documents. However, at VFS, I found out that I had applied in the wrong appointment category (tourist), which depends on the purpose of the visit, and that my travel dates do not allow enough time for visa authorities to make a decision. Apparently, even if you plan to stay only for a part of the trip with the host, you need to apply under the category “Visiting Friends and Family”.
Thus, I had to book another appointment under this category, and took the opportunity to shift my travel dates to allow at least 15 business days for the visa application to be processed, removing Christmas and New Year’s Eve from my itinerary.
The process went smoothly, and my visa application was submitted by VFS. For reference, here’s a list of documents I submitted -
VFS appointment letter
Duly-filled visa application form
Original passport
Copy of passport
1 photograph
My 6 months bank account statement
Cover letter
Consent form (that visa processing will take up to 15 business days)
Snehal’s job contract
My work contract
Rent contract of Snehal
Residence permit of Snehal
A copy of Snehal’s passport
Invitation letter from Snehal
Return flight ticket reservations
Travel insurance for the intended travel dates
The following charges were collected from me.
| Service Description | Amount (Indian Rupees) |
|---|---|
| Cash Handling Charge - SAC Code: (SAC:998599) | 0 |
| VFS Fee - India - SAC Code: (SAC:998599) | 1,820 |
| VISA Fee - India - SAC Code: | 7,280 |
| Convenience Fee - SAC Code: (SAC:998599) | 182 |
| Courier Service - SAC Code: (SAC:998599) | 728 |
| Courier Assurance - SAC Code: (SAC:998599) | 182 |
| Total | 10,192 |
I later learned that the courier charges (728 INR) and the courier assurance charges (182 INR) mentioned above were optional. However, VFS didn’t ask whether I wanted to include them. When the emabssy is done processing your application, it will send your passport back to VFS, from where you can either collect it yourself or get it couriered back home, which requires you to pay courier charges. However, courier assurance charges do not add any value as VFS cannot “assure” anything about courier and I suggest you get them removed.
My visa application was submitted on the 21st of December 2023. A few days later, on the 29th of December 2023, I received an email from the Austrian embassy asking me to submit an additional document -
Subject: AUSTRIAN VISA APPLICATION - AMENDMENT REQUEST: Ravi Dwivedi VIS 4331
Dear Applicant,
On 22.12.2023 your application for Visa C was registered at the Embassy. You are requested to kindly send the scanned copies of the following documents via email to the Embassy or submit the documents at the nearest VFS centre, for further processing of your application:
- Kindly submit Electronic letter of guarantee “EVE- Elektronische Verpflichtungserklärung” obtained from the “Fremdenpolizeibehörde” of the sponsor’s district in Austria. Once your host company/inviting company has obtained the EVE, please share the reference number (starting from DEL_____) received from the authorities, with the Embassy.
Kindly Note: It is in your own interest to fulfil the requirements as indicated above and submit the missing documents within 14 days of the receipt of this email. Otherwise a decision will be taken based on the documentation available. “Sie werden in Ihrem Interesse ersucht, die gekennzeichneten Mängel so schnell wie möglich zu beheben bzw. fehlende Unterlagen umgehend nachzureichen, um die weitere Bearbeitung des Antrages zu ermöglichen. Sollten Sie innerhalb 14 Tagen die gekennzeichneten Mängel nicht beheben bzw. die fehlenden Unterlagen nicht nachreichen, wird über den vorliegenden Antrag ohne diese Unterlagen bzw. Mängelbehebung entschieden.” Austrian Embassy New Delhi
R.J/ Consular Section +91 11 2419 2700 EP-13, Chandragupta Marg, Chanakyapuri, New Delhi 110 021, India bmeia.gv.at/botschaft/new-delhi facebook.at/AustrianEmbassyNewDelhihttp://www.facebook.at/AustrianEmbassyNewDelhi | twitter.com/MFA_Austriahttp://www.twitter.com/MFA_Austria
[refocus1][Signatur_V+30]https://www.bmeia.gv.at/en/european-foreign-policy/foreign-trade/refocus-austria/[Logo_AT_IN_22px]
I misunderstood the required document (the EVE) to be a scanned copy of the letter of guarantee form signed by Snehal, and responded by attaching it.
Upon researching, Snehal determined that the document is an electronic letter of guarantee, and is supposed to be obtained at a local police station in Vienna. He visited a police station the next day and had a hard time conversing due to the language barrier (German is the common language in Austria, whereas Snehal speaks English). That day was a weekend, so he took an appointment for Monday, but in the meantime the embassy had finished processing my visa.
My visa was denied, and the refusal letter stated:
The Austrian embassy in Delhi examined your application; the visa has been refused.
The decision is based on the following reason(s):
The information submitted regarding the justification for the purpose and conditions of the intended stay was not reliable.
There are reasonable doubts as to your intention to leave the territory of the Member States before the expiry of the visa.
Other remarks:
You have been given an amendment request, which you have failed to fulfil, or have only fulfilled inadequately, within the deadline set.
You are a first-time traveller. The social and economic roots with the home country are not evident. The return from Schengen territory does therefore not seem to be certain.
I could have reapplied after obtaining the EVE, but I didn’t because I found the following line
The social and economic roots with the home country are not evident.
offensive for someone who was born and raised in India, got the impression that the absence of electronic guarantee letter was not the only reason behind the refusal, had already wasted 12,000 INR on this application, and my friend’s stay in Austria was uncertain after January. In fact, my friend soon returned to India.
To summarize -
Such incidents are a waste of time and money for applicants, and an embarrassment to VFS and the Austrian visa authorities. I suggest that the Austrian visa authorities fix that URL, and provide instructions for hosts to obtain the EVE.
Credits to Snehal and Contrapunctus for editing, Badri for proofreading.
Most banks are behind CDNs and DDoS mitigation providers nowadays, though they still hold their own IP space. Was interested in this, so compiled a list from BGP.Tools and Hurricane Electric BGP Toolkit.
Other noteable mentions:
Let me know if I’m missing someone. Many thanks to Saswata Sarkar for helping with the list.
Recently, Ola started rolling out Ola Maps in their main mobile app, replacing Google Maps, while also offering maps as a service to other organizations. The interesting part for me was the usage of OpenStreetMap data as base map with Ola’s proprietary data sources. I’ll mostly about talk about map data part here.
OpenStreetMap (OSM) for starters, is a community owned and edited map data resource which gives freedom to use map data for any purpose. This includes the condition that attribution is given back to OSM which in turn ideally would encourage other users to contribute, correct and edit, helping everyone in turn. Due to this, OSM is also regarded as Wikipedia of maps. OSM data is not just used by Ola. Many others use it for various purposes like Wikipedia Maps, Strava Maps, Snapchat Map, bus tracking in GoIbibo/Redbus.
OSM India community has been following Ola map endeavor to use and contribute to OSM since they went public. As required by OSM for organized mapping efforts, Ola created wiki entry with information regarding their editors, usage, policy and mentions following as their data usage case:
OSM data is used for the road network, traffic signs and signals, buildings, natural features, landuse polygons and some POIs.
Creating a map product is a task in itself, an engineering hurdle creating the tech stack for collection, validation, import and serving the map and the map data part. Ola has done a good job describing the development of tech stack in their blog post. Ola holds an enormous corpus of live and constantly updated GPS trace data. Their drivers, users, and delivery partners generate those, which they harness to validate, correct and add missing map data. Ola employees now regularly contribute new or missing roads (including adding dual carriageway to existing ones), fix road geometry, classification, road access type and restrictions pan India. They have been active and engaging in OSM India community channels, though community members have raised some concerns on their OSM edit practices.
Ola’s venture into the map industry isn’t something out of the ordinary. Grab, a South East Asian company which has business interests in food deliveries, ride hailing and a bunch of other services too switched to their in-house map based on OpenStreetMap, followed by launching of their map product. Grab too contributed back data like Ola. Both Ola and Grab heavily rely on map for their business operations and seem to chose to go independent for it, bootstrapping the products on OSM.
In India too, a bunch of organizations contribute to OSM like Swiggy, Stackbox, Amazon, Apple. Microsoft, Meta/Facebook and many others. Everyone wants a better map (data), so everyone works together.
Ola could have gone their own route, bootstrapping map data from scratch, which would have been a gargantuan task when you’re competing against the likes of Google Maps and Bing Maps, which have been into this since many years. Deciding to use OSM and actively giving back to make data better for everyone deserves accolades. Now I’m waiting to for their second blog post, which they mention would be on map data.
If you’re an Ola map user through Ola Electric or Ola app, and find some road unmapped, you can always edit them in OSM. What I have heard from their employee, they import new OSM data weekly, which means your changes should start reflecting for you (and everyone else) by next week. If you’re new, follow Beginners’ guide and join OSM India community community.osm.be/resources/asia/india/ for any doubts and participating in various mapping events.
PS — You can see live OSM edits in India subcontinent here.
Terminal emulator is like a home,every linux user wants to customize their terminal either fonts,appearance etc.
I was a bash user for all these years, and switched to fish a few months ago, until i found the zsh and zimfw.
I used ohmyzsh along with zsh for good theme.I use a default ohmyzsh theme.
sudo apt install zsh zsh-autosuggestions zsh-syntax-highlighting
Installing zsh-autosuggestions and zsh-syntax-highlighting packages to enable autosuggestions and syntax highlighting for zsh.
Append the below lines to .zshrc to enable autosuggestions and syntax highlighting.
source "/usr/share/zsh-syntax-highlighting/zsh-syntax-highlighting.zsh"
source "/usr/share/zsh-autosuggestions/zsh-autosuggestions.zsh"Fuzzy Finder, is a command line tool to find previously executed commands.
To enable fzf with zsh, add the following in .zshrc after installing fzf.
source "/usr/share/doc/fzf/examples/key-bindings.zsh"
source "/usr/share/doc/fzf/examples/completion.zsh"Below is the image after fzf configuration with zsh.
Thanks (:
Prior to arrival in Kenya, you need to apply for an Electronic Travel Authorization (eTA) on their website by uploading all the required documents. This system is in place since Jan 2024 after the country abolished the visa system. The required documents will depend on the purpose of your visit, which in my case, was to attend a conference.
Here is the list of documents I submitted for my eTA:
Scanned copy of my passport
Photograph with white background
Flight tickets (reservation)
Hotel bookings (reservation)
Invitation letter from the conference
Yellow Fever vaccination certificate (optional)
Job contract (optional)
“Reservation” means I didn’t book the flights and hotels, but rather reserved them. Additionally, “optional” means that those documents were not mandatory to submit, but I submitted them in the “Other Documents” section in order to support my application. After submitting the eTA, I had to make a payment of around 35 US Dollars (approximately 3000 Indian Rupees).
It took 40 hours for me to receive an email from Kenya stating that my eTA has been approved, along with an attached PDF, making this one of my smoothest experiences of obtaining travel documents to travel to a country :). An eTA is technically not a visa, but I put the word “visa” in the title due to familiarity with the term.
Recently, I got vaccinated with yellow fever vaccine as I am planning to travel to Kenya, a high risk country for yellow fever, in the near future. It should be taken at least 10 days before getting into the areas with yellow fever transmission to provide enough time for the formation of the antibodies. In order to get vaccinated, I searched for vaccination centers in Delhi and stumbled upon this page by the Indian government, which lists vaccination centers for yellow fever all over India. From that list, I made a phone call to the Airport Health Organization, a vaccination center near the Delhi Airport.
They asked me to write an email stating that I need yellow fever vaccination. After sending the email, they prompted me to attach a scanned copy of my passport data page, upon sending which they emailed me my appointment date, asking me to pay 300 INR in advance along with other instructions. The appointment date was 4 days after I sent scanned copy of my passport. The email also mentioned that those who are allergic to eggs or have never taken eggs should instead visit RML Hospital.
The vaccination center must be visited during 10 AM to 12 noon on the date of appointment. I reached there at around 11 AM and got vaccinated in around 40 minutes, followed by obtaining a vaccine certificate in half an hour.
One dose of this vaccine gives immunity against yellow fever for lifetime. Therefore, I can travel to any country with yellow fever transmission after getting this dose. Although some countries may require proof of vaccination within some time frame and some people might need a booster dose to maintain immunity.
I keep on going back and correcting bootload of grammatical and other errors in my posts here. I somewhat feel embarrassed how such mistakes slip through when I was proofreading. Back then it was all good and suddenly this mistake cropped up in my text, which everyone might have already noticed by now. A thought just stuck around that. Those mistakes signify that the text is written by a real human, and humans makes mistakes. :)
PS - Even LanguageTool (non-premium) couldn’t identify those errors.
I became interested in Network Time Protocol (NTP) last year after learning how fundamental this protocol is to the functioning of the global Internet. NTP helps synchronize clocks on devices over the Internet, which is essential for secure browsing, timestamping, keeping everyone in sync or just checking what time it is. Computers usually have a hardware real-time clock (RTC) but that deviates over time, so an occasional sync over NTP is required to keep the time accurate. Many network and IoT devices don’t have hardware RTC so have even more reliance on NTP.
Accurate time keeping starts with reference clocks like atomic clocks, GPS etc. Multiple government standard agencies host these reference clocks, which are regarded as Stratum 0. Stratum 1 servers are known as primary servers, and directly connect to Stratum 0 clocks for time. Stratum 1 servers then distribute time to Stratum 2 and further down the hierarchy. Computers typically connects to one or more Stratum 1/2/3… servers to get their time.
Someone has to host these public Stratum 1,2,3… NTP servers. That’s what NTP pool, a global effort by volunteers does. They provide NTP servers for the public to use. As of today, there are 4700+ servers in the pool which are free to use for anyone.
Now let’s come to the reason for writing this post. Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) in April 2022 released a set of cybersecurity directions which set the alarm bells ringing. Internet Society (and almost everyone else) wrote about it.
And then there was this specific section about NTP:
All service providers, intermediaries, data centres, body corporate and Government organisations shall connect to the Network Time Protocol (NTP) Server of National Informatics Centre (NIC) or National Physical Laboratory (NPL) or with NTP servers traceable to these NTP servers, for synchronisation of all their ICT systems clocks. Entities having ICT infrastructure spanning multiple geographies may also use accurate and standard time source other than NPL and NIC, however it is to be ensured that their time source shall not deviate from NPL and NIC.
CSIR-National Physical Laboratory (NPL) is the official timekeeper for India and hosts the only public Stratum 1 clock in India, according to NTP pool website. So I was naturally curious to know what kind of infrastructure they’re running for NTP. India has a Right to Information (RTI) Act which, like the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in the United States, gives citizens rights to request information from governmental entities, to which they have to respond in under 30 days. So last year, I filed two sets of RTI (one after the first reply came) inquiring about NPL’s public NTP server setup.
The first RTI had some generic questions:
This gave a vague idea about the setup, so I sat down and came with some specific questions in the next RTI.
Feel free to make your conclusions from it now. Bear in mind these were filled last year so things might have changed. Do let me know if you have more information about it.
Update (07/07/2024): Found an article from Medianama about Indian government time servers with information sourced through RTI.
Internet and it’s working are interesting and complex. We need an IP address to connect to the Internet. A group of IP addresses with common routing policy is known as an Autonomous System (AS). Each AS has a globally unique Autonomous System Number (ASN) and is maintained by a single entity or individual(s). Your ISP would have an ASN. IP addresses/prefixes are advertised (announced) by an AS through Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) to its peers (ASes which it connects to) to steer traffic in its direction or back.
Take for example Google DNS service at 8.8.8.8 owned and operated by AS15169 Google LLC. AS15169 through BGP announcements, lets all its peers know that traffic for whole of 8.8.8.0/24 (including 8.8.8.8) prefix should be sent to them. See the following screenshot response of mtr -zt 8.8.8.8 from my system. From my Internet Service Provider (ISP), AS133982 Excitel Broadband, traffic travels to AS15169 to reach 8.8.8.8 (dns.google) and returns via the same path. This Inter-AS traffic makes the Internet tick.
ASes comes in different sizes and purposes. Like AS749 DoD Network Information Center which holds more than 200 million+ IPv4 addresses for historical reasons or AS23860 Alliance Broadband Services which has 68 thousand+ IPv4 address for purpose of providing consumer Internet.
Similarly, some individuals also run their personal ASN including a bunch of Indians. Most of these Indian ASNs are IPv6 (primary or only) networks run for hobby and educational purposes. I was interested in this data, so complied a list of active ones (visible in the global routing table) from BGP.Tools:
Let me know if I’m missing someone.
At home, I have both a laptop and a *desktop PC. Most of my essential things, such as emails, repositories, password managers, contacts, and calendars are synced between the two devices. However, when I need to share some documents and I am lazy enough to go pick a flash drive, my only option is to push them to the Internet and download them on the other system, which is sitting at 20~ meters away. Typically, I do this either through email attachments or a matrix client.
Occasionally, I think about setting up a network storage solution at home. But then I ask myself do I really need one.
In my home network, I already have a Raspberry Pi running as my Wi-Fi router, doing DNS level ad blocking with Dnsmasq and DNS over TLS with stubby. Rpi has a 16GB memory card. I can mount RPi remote directory to both machines.
I use pcmanfm as my file manager. It has the ability (like every other file managers) to mount remote storage over ssh. But one annoying thing is that whenever I open the mount directory, by default it shows the root file system of the remote device even when I explicitly mentioned the path.
Then I discovered sshfs. I wrote the following script, which mount remote directory and open that in pcmanfm.
#!/bin/bash
LOCMOUNT="/home/user/Public"
sshfs raspberrypi:Public $LOCMOUNT
pcmanfm $MOUNT
I haven’t enabled any encryption for the memory until now since other than some logs RPi wasn’t writing anything to it. I set up fscrypt on Rpi storage now. And ta-da, a lazy person’s local sharing solution.
*Desktop - Well, technically it’s an old laptop with a broken keyboard and trackpad, connected to a monitor, keyboard and mouse. I don’t feel keeping it on a shelf.
I wrote about my blog writing methodology back April 2021. My writing method has undergone a significant shift now, so thought about writing this update.
New blog topics are added to my note-taking app quite frequently now. Occasionally going through the list, I merge topics, change order to prioritize certain topics or purely drop ideas which seems not worth a write-up. Due to this, I have the liberty to work on blogs according to mood. Writing the last one was tiring, so I chose to work on an easy one, i.e. this blog now.
Topic decided, everything starts on etherpad now. Etherpad has this nice font and sync feature, which helps me write from any device of choice. Actual writing usually happens in the morning, right after I wake up. For most topics, I quickly jot down pointers and keep on expanding them over the course of multiple days at a leisurely pace. Though, sometime it adds too many pieces in the puzzle and takes additional time to put everything in flow. New pointer addition keeps on happening along with writing. Nowadays, pictures too dot my blog, which I rarely use to do earlier. I have come to believe on less usage of external links. These breaks the flow of readers. If someone is sufficiently motivated to learn more about something, finding useful sources isn’t.
As the first draft comes into being, I run it through LanguageTool for spelling corrections (which typically are many) and fixing grammatical issues. Post that, for the first time I read the complete write-up in one go for formation of coherent storyline, moving paragraphs around for form a structure , adding explainers wherever something new or unexplained is introduced, removing elaborate sentences, making amends wherever required and moving paragraphs around for forming structure. Another round of LanguageTool follows. All set now, I try to space out my final read before publishing, which helps find additional mistakes or loopholes.
When everything is set, I do hugo to generate the site and rsync everything to the web server. A final git sync closes the publication part.
After a day or two, I come back to read the blog on the website. This entails another round finding and fixing trivial mistakes. After this, it’s set for good.
Nowadays, in addition to being on my blog, everything is syndicated on Planet FSCI and Planet Debian, which has given it more visibility. As someone who’s into infrastructure and Internet as a lot, I do pay attention to logs on my server, but as a disconnected exercise to if the blog is being read or not. More hits on the blog doesn’t translate to any gratification for me, at least for writers’ point of view. Occasionally, people do mention my blog, which does flatter me. Four years and nearly a hundred posts later, I still wonder how I kept on writing for this long.
I let go my domain abhijithpa.me. It was getting expensive and I don’t fancy that anymore. I never actually purchased this domain but came with a package offer. I then kept it for couple of years.
I have now bought a new domain abhijithpa.in and pointed everything to it.
So if you are seeing abhijithpa.me with lot of contents, that is no me. Its either domain squatters or someone impersonating me.
As I’m gearing towards setting up a Free Software download mirror in India, it occurred to me that I haven’t chronicled the work and motivation behind setting up the original mirror in the first place. Also, seems like it would be good to document stuff here for observing the progression, as the mirror is going multi-country now. Right now, my existing mirror i.e., mirrors.de.sahilister.net (was mirrors.sahilister.in), is hosted in Germany and serves traffic for Termux, NomadBSD, Blender, BlendOS and GIMP. For a while in between, it hosted OSMC project mirror as well.
To explain what is a Free Software download mirror thing is first, I’ll quote myself from work blog -
As most Free Software doesn’t have commercial backing and require heavy downloads, the concept of software download mirrors helps take the traffic load off of the primary server, leading to geographical redundancy, higher availability and faster download in general.
So whenever someone wants to download a particular (mirrored) software and click download, upstream redirects the download to one of the mirror server which is geographical (or in other parameters) nearby to the user, leading to faster downloads and load sharing amongst all mirrors.
Since the time I got into Linux and servers, I always wanted to help the community somehow, and mirroring seemed to be the most obvious thing. India seems to be a country which has traditionally seen less number of public download mirrors. IITB, TiFR, and some of the public institutions used to host them for popular Linux and Free Softwares, but they seem to be diminishing these days.
In the last months of 2021, I started using Termux and saw that it had only a few mirrors (back then). I tried getting a high capacity, high bandwidth node in budget but it was hard in India in 2021-22. So after much deliberation, I decided to go where it’s available and chose a German hosting provider with the thought of adding India node when conditions are favorable (thankfully that happened, and India node is live too now.). Termux required only 29 GB of storage, so went ahead and started mirroring it. I raised this issue in Termux’s GitHub repository in January 2022. This blog post chronicles the start of the mirror.
Termux has high request counts from a mirror point of view. Each Termux client, usually checks every mirror in selected group for availability before randomly selecting one for download (only other case is when client has explicitly selected a single mirror using termux-repo-change). The mirror started getting thousands of requests daily due to this but only a small percentage would actually get my mirror in selection, so download traffic was lower. Similar thing happened with OSMC too (which I started mirroring later).
With this start, I started exploring various project that would be benefit from additional mirrors. Public information from Academic Computer Club in Umeå’s mirror and Freedif’s mirror stats helped to figure out storage and bandwidth requirements for potential projects. Fun fact, Academic Computer Club in Umeå (which is one of the prominent Debian, Ubuntu etc.) mirror, now has 200 Gbits/s uplink to the internet through SUNET.
Later, I migrated to a different provider for better speeds and added LibreSpeed test on the mirror server. Those were fun times. Between OSMC, Termux and LibreSpeed, I was getting almost 1.2 millions hits/day on the server at its peak, crossing for the first time a TB/day traffic number.
Next came Blender, which took the longest time to set up of around 9–10 months. Blender had a push-trigger requirement for rsync from upstream that took quite some back and forth. It now contributes the most amount of traffic on the mirror. On release days, mirror does more than 3 TB/day and normal days, it hovers around 2 TB/day. Gimp project is the latest addition.
At one time, the mirror traffic touched 4.97 TB/day traffic number. That’s when I decided on dropping LibreSpeed server to solely focus on mirroring for now, keeping the bandwidth allotment for serving downloads only.
The mirror projects selection grew organically. I used to reach out many projects discussing the need of for additional mirrors. Some projects outright denied mirroring request as Germany already has a good academic mirrors boosting 20-25 Gbits/s speeds from FTP era, which seems fair. Finding the niche was essential to only add softwares, which would truly benefit from additional capacity. There were months when nothing much would happen with the mirror, rsync would continue to update the mirror while nginx would keep on serving the traffic. Nowadays, the mirror pushes around 70 TB/month. I occasionally check logs, vnstat, add new security stuff here and there and pay the bills. It now saturates the Gigabit link sometimes and goes beyond that, peaking around 1.42 Gbits/s (the hosting provider seems to be upping their game). The plan is to upgrade the link to better speeds.
On the way, learned quite a few things like -
In hindsight, the statistics look amazing, hundreds of TBs of traffic served from the mirror, month after month. That does show that there’s still an appetite for public mirrors in time of commercially “donated” CDNs and GitHub. The world could have done with one less mirror, but it saved some time, lessened the burden for others, while providing redundancy and traffic localization with one additional mirror. And it’s fun for someone like me who’s into infrastructure that powers the Internet. Now, I’ll try focusing and expanding the India mirror, which in itself started pushing almost half a TB/day. Long live Free Software and public download mirrors.
Cheers to 23,my another year of existence on this planet. A wonderful day filled with wishes from friends and family.
Time Flies. Time Flies faster every year.
Time Flies whether you're having fun or not,
whether you're living your life big or small,
whether you surround yourself with fear or Laughter - Claire CookIts exactly been an year since i was graduated from my bachelor’s degree.Last year at this point of time, was with my friends for the last trip of engineering.We had our convocation last month,after months of graduating. Wrote a separate blog post about attending the college convocation. These days the weekends is mostly to meet up college & hostel friends to chit chat about how we miss our good old days :)
Yayy i started reading books,the first book i read was When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi gifted by my friend.Currently reading IKIGAI the japanese way of living life.I also wish to write a summary/review of the books i read if i find time over weekends.I also started loving to write more blog posts about the things happening.
I’ve messed up my Debian Developer process, i regret it and i hope to contribute more time to debian and i wish to become one atleast in the coming year.
I also have a huge pending list of tasks to be done,mostly learning stuff.
Lastly thanking family & friends for supporting me.
Bye!!!
via these fine people and organizations:
