Blog

100 Days of Tmux

instead of using your terminal (iterm2, ghostty, kitty, etc) native shortcuts, learn the tmux ones - they pay off when you run tmux on a remote host.

Sudo Save a file as Regular User

Know that feeling when you incorrectly open a file as a regular user but you just can't damn save the file because it's owned by root?

The Message Type in iOS Shortcuts

iOS Shortcuts has the "every thing is an object" philosophy which plays quite well when you pair it with variables. As such, it allows you to use a single input (whatever you pass onto the shortcut)...

Switching between Safari Profile Windows - Not Creating New Ones

Safari Profiles are a great power user tool. If you'd like to separate concerns like between work, personal, side projects – make a profile for each one.

Placement Rules in Ceph S3

Placement rules in ceph are a method to assign a specific data pool, index pool and extra pools to a particular bucket. Placement rules are assigned to buckets at the time of creation and cannot be...

Fix Login Delay on Debian LXC on Proxmox

I recently migrated my ingress from a VM to a container on Proxmox. The primary motivation was that the VM, running Docker with a web server container, was frequently encountering space constraints....

Safari goes nuts everytime I watch a YouTube Video

So I was watching kitze's latest video on why you shouldn't build in public maybe on Safari and my Airpods Pro 2 make the same stuttering / chopping sound with the audio and video falling out of...

Obsidian vs Calendar Reminders and Obsidian

Since humankind evolved, one question has persisted: to obsidian or to obsidian with other tools in parallel. This note tries to balance out the equation by throwing in some personal observations...

TLS Handshake Timeout in Docker Containers within Proxmox SDN

I use Proxmox SDN and a eVPN Zone as my main network which means the default MTU is 1450.

Things to do after installing Proxmox

There are a few tweaks I make after installing proxmox. This is when installing Proxmox is done through the provided liveiso. Usually though however I use the OpenZFS guide to install Debian first...

Unsupported File Formats in iOS Photos - H264 Main-L6

It turns out iOS Photos does not support H264 files that have the profile Main@L6 and apparently, also SVG. For a list of supported formats for Photos, Apple says this:

Google Workspace Delegate Calendars on iPhone

Google Workspace Delegated Calendars do not show up on the Apple Calendar on iPhone. It does so on my Mac, under a "Delegated Calendars" section like so:

Resisting Craft V3

In a time when everybody on X is hyping up the newest release of Craft Docs, I have a few counterpoints to make. But first, let’s take a look at the product.

The Password Manager Situation

Password managers have come a long way, and so have my requirements. Back in 2019, I started looking into Password Managers (or even before that, I don't remember really) after getting increasingly...

Finding Bluetooth LMP version on MacOS

Finding information about devices isn't exactly straightforward on MacOS.

Ceph PG Scaling

At croit, the recommendation is to maintain the number of PGs in a pool such that each PG roughly holds about 45G of data. In order to achieve the number, the following calculation works:

BusyCal vs Fantastical

On MacOS, Fantastical and BusyCal are both excellent choices, with very few things left to personal preference.

Time Flies By

Time-blocking is a very interesting idea that floats around the internet, with several people planning out their days, weeks, months and even a year in advance. Of course, those plans are never...

Keep Playing Audio in Safari When Switching to Another Tab Group

Safari has this annoying issue as a feature, and it gets increasingly frustrating the more I ignore it - when content (like YouTube, a Google Meet session, etc) has audio playback in one tab, and...

Stop Whining, Instead Explore

Bridge MTUs in Proxmox

General Networking says that:

Make Proxmox Console Work Reliably with a Load Balancer

Everybody around me knows that I am a big fan of Proxmox but very few people know that even though I load balance it, my heart races everytime I click on the console page of any VM or Container, and...

Getting Forwarded IPs Right with Cloudflare

When the orange cloud is ticked on Cloudflare DNS records, every request is proxied by Cloudflare.

The X-Forwarded-For HTTP Header

The X-Forwarded-For is a request header that should contain the originating IP address (client IP) and the proxies that the client passes through.

Static MAC Address for a Linux Bridge on Debian or Proxmox

Everytime a systemctl restart networking is run on Proxmox or the host is rebooted, the bridges vmbr{0,1,2..} are assigned different MAC Addresses. Normally this is fine but as I am running my home...

Using Caps Lock as NOT the Hyper Key

Instead of going the regular route and using Caps Lock as a hyper key / hyper key layer, I tried to use it with the new feature from BetterTouchTool, which blocks (and releases) keyboard input...

Getting Rid of fwbr- Interfaces on Proxmox

Proxmox creates fwbr interfaces when you start a VM with any bridge attached, as seen here. This is done because firewall rules (using the proxmox firewall) cannot be set directly on a bridge,...

Virtual Router in Proxmox with the Skullsaints Onyx

Alright, everybody pretty much knows this but since I am speaking to the larger public here: my homelab isn't really at home. It's actually a proxmox cluster from the Hetzner auction, servers that I...

EVPN + VXLAN in Proxmox SDN

EVPN is the control plane that's responsible for populating the forwarding table and the routing table, while VXLAN is the data plane that's responsible for carry packets between the addresses in...

Migrating VMs on Encrypted Proxmox

I have three Proxmox nodes, two of them I installed with zfs native encryption (after switching from LUKS encryption, learning about the two disk overhead) and the third one I installed without...

Hidden Folders in Finder

Hidden folders are disabled by default on MacOS, which means it won't see any files and folders starting a . (period/dot).

Storage Classes in Ceph S3

Storage classes in ceph correspond to a certain data pool. They are a subsection of placement rules that link them to data pools. A storage class is unique to a placement rule but placement rules...

Deloading in Hypertrophy Training

Deloading is a period of off-training that is either programmed or reactive, and is meant for providing muscle groups with more time to recover. However, with recent research, the amount of time...

No Longer a Journal Virgin

I remember as a kid when, each year, was a welcome to a brand new year of new diaries which meant a brand new attempt at journaling. Of course I would start on a whim, yet full of inspiration, make...

Enable Key Spam or Disable Special Characters on MacOS

MacOS has this behaviour where if you hold a key, such as in my case, holding k to move up in VSCode, a special character popup appears where you can choose an alternative character for the key...

Long Live Wordpress

The migration is complete. Wordpress was still temporarily active to give me ample time to migrate posts. However, as open source goes, somebody somewhere has attempted something similar and my job...

Firefox Profile Downgrade

Sometimes it's useful to test stable versions of firefox as the beta and nightly versions may have some bugs that haven't made their way to stable yet. One such bug is the one I encountered today,...

Increase Disk Space on Proxmox VM

To increase disk space on a Proxmox VM, two steps are required: growing the partition and resizing the filesystem[^1].

OSD Scrubs on HDD v/s SSD

OSD Max Scrubs (osdmaxscrubs) is a Ceph configuration parameter that defines how many simultaneous scrub operations an OSD can perform. Scrubbing is Ceph's data integrity checking mechanism that...

Moving from Wordpress to Quartz

Wordpress is a fantastic CMS, no doubt, something which I have relied on since my early days of self-hosting in 2019. However, the problem wasn't related to software; it was more mental. The more I...

Changing Wordpress URL

My wordpress instance was hosted at https://kayg.org, however I replaced it with Quartz before exporting / importing content. Therefore, I need it accessible over at https://wp.kayg.org so I can...

Querying Ceph Configuration

These commands fetch configuration as reported by the running daemons.

Difference Between OSD Reweight and CRUSH Reweight

ceph has two ways of changing an OSD's weight.

Nearfull Ratio

monosdnearfull_ratio is the maximum / threshold percentage of disk space used before an OSD is considered as a nearfull-osd. When utilisation crosses nearfull-ratio, it can reach backfillfull-ratio...

Backfillfull Ratio

The maximum or threshold percentage of disk space that can be used before an OSD is considered too full to backfill. This ratio is reached after crossing nearfull-ratio. Once utilisation crosses...

Full Ratio

Nearfull OSD

Replacing a failed drive in a Ceph Cluster

Drives that are failing might emit errors in one of the parameters of the SMART log which can be obtained with:

Ceph Quincy MDS Standby-Replay Memory Leak

The Ceph MDS standby-replay daemon is affected by a now-fixed memory leak bug that causes gradually increasing memory consumption[^1].

Slow Operations in Ceph OSDs

When Ceph reports slow operations, they can be investigated using the dumphistoricops command[^1].

T7 Shield - APFS vs NTFS

I got the 4 TB Samsung T7 Shield back in August or October 2023 for a very appealing price of 24k INR but it has sat in my bag since, except for a benchmark that I ran once or so and never published...

Ceph Operation v/s Subop Latency

- Measures the total time taken for a client operation (read/write) to complete

MDS failing to Respond to Cache Pressure

MDS cache pressure occurs when the Metadata Server (MDS) requests clients to release their cache, but clients are either slow to respond or fail to honor these requests[^1].

Ceph OSD Memory Usage

The osdmemorytarget parameter in Ceph sets a soft limit for the memory usage of Object Storage Daemons (OSDs). It helps manage how much memory each OSD uses, but it doesn't enforce a strict cap....

Compacting Ceph OSDs

RocksDB compaction in Ceph is a process aimed at reducing fragmentation in the RocksDB database and improving the performance of daemons like OSDs and MONs. Over time, as clusters handle a large...

Ceph Spurious Read Errors

Transient read errors in ceph (also referred to as spurious read errors) are failures that occur briefly and then resolve on subsequent attempts. Ceph retries the read operation up to four times. If...

Retrieving the correct IP address for a Caddy-Wordpress stack

Now the problem with using the plugin was that when I enabled Brute-Force protection, the only IP that would get blacklisted all the time was an internal IP. It would lock me out. I shamelessly...

CosmicByte Firefly: Mechanical Keyboard on a Budget - First Impressions

Having bought my first mechanical keyboard, it felt apt that I get into the unboxing game but when I noticed that the chaotic packaging containing just the keyboard, an unboxing video would have...

List (2011), dir. Hong Sang-soo

Mind Game (2004), dir. Masaaki Yuasa

Following (1998), dir. Christopher Nolan

Right Now, Wrong Then (2015), dir Hong Sang-Soo

Ae Dil Hai Mushkil (2016), dir. Karan Johar

Dunkirk (2017), dir. Christopher Nolan

Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (2000), dir. Hong Sang-Soo

The Day a Pig Fell into the Well (1996), dir. Hong Sang-soo

The Power of Kangwon Province (1998), dir. Hong Sang-soo