Balaji's Tech Notes

I’ve been having some issues with dying equipment in my kitchen recently which has resulted in the breakers tripping in the electrical junction box a few times. That meant that all of my network and servers went down unexpectedly which created it’s own problems - as it turns out I have enough equipment plugged in that just flipping the breaker again would result in another trip, due to too much power draw! [Read More]

The most important reason for not using the DNS servers that your ISP provides is protecting your privacy as it’s been proved many times that ISP’s are not averse to hijacking your DNS results to serve ads or worse. But the other reason is that quite often the DNS servers that ISP’s operate are slow, they tend to have long cache times which means that changes to your domain IP’s can be hard to test from your local machine. [Read More]

I noticed that one of my homelab machines had a slight clock drift problem. However, once I fixed that I wound up with an issue where ZSH starting printing a message “Corrupt history file” after every command. I suspect that this is because the History file had a timestamp in the future as compared to the system time. Since I did not want to lose my entire shell history, I was able to fix this by running the following commands: [Read More]

I’ve mentioned this in passing in an earlier post about Proxmox but until recently, I had a 3-node Proxmox cluster on a set of NUC’s for my Homelab. The 3-node setup is great because it means you can reboot individual nodes without causing the entire cluster to become unavailable. Unfortunately, as I mentioned in the earlier post about Proxmox the NUC-clone I got from Aliexpress was basically unusable after the upgrade to Proxmox 6 - it would have regular Kernel panics and even installing kdump or setting up remote logging did not yield any results. [Read More]

Continuing the theme of upgrades breaking things, I realized that after the reinstallation of Proxmox I was not able to restore my tmux sessions. The mapped commands in my .tmux.conf for session-save, session-restore were not working but everything else was. An initial check seemed to suggest it was PEBKAC error since I needed to clone the tmux plugin manager into my .tmux folder. However, even after doing that and trying to install the plugins via the plugin manager the session functionality was not working. [Read More]

I have been dealing with a strange heisen-bug with my Zettelkasten notes where occasionally a note will wind up with the wrong (or mixed) line endings after it has been updated by a script that inserts backlinks within the notes. I say heisen-bug since I can’t reproduce it and I’m not 100% confident that it is the script that is triggering this problem. The symptom of this problem is when the file is open in Emacs, you see ugly “^M” characters at the end of each-line. [Read More]

If you are using Confluence, you might have come across an annoying behaviour when using the type-ahead search that appears in the left navigation bar - the search bar will search across all available “Spaces” in the Confluence site which on a big shared site, can result in a lot of spurious hits. The Confluence documentation states that this is by design when using the default theme. Thankfully, there is a way to fix the search so that it only searches within a particular Confluence" “Space”. [Read More]

I came across Sultan many months ago and had filed it away for future reference. Cue the work I’ve been doing on automating my Zettelkasten workflow in Python and in order to simplify calling out to an external program (no points for guessing that the program I’m calling is pandoc) I decided to use Sultan. In general, I found using Sultan a pretty smooth experience with the exception of one annoying glitch. [Read More]

As part of my workflow for my Zettelkasten notes, I’ve been creating a set of Python scripts that change the wikilink-style links that most Zettelkasten software use into something better understood by standard Markdown renderers. I used Python venvs for these scripts and discovered one annoyance - if you use Windows Command Prompt (cmd.exe) as your default terminal in PyCharm or elsewhere, when you activate the venv, the environment name that appears in the prompt will the name of the venv folder and not of your git repo where you are developing the scripts. [Read More]

After tearing my hair out 1 with the DHCP issue, the next problem I started seeing was one my NUC’s would randomly hard crash and only powering it down and back up again would fix the issue. In most cases, the syslog would be completely empty which made things worse but I eventually managed to find an entry in the syslog that looked like this: e1000e 0000:00:1f.6 eno1: Detected Hardware Unit Hang Checking on the Proxmox forums for that error message turned up this very long thread within which I found the answer. [Read More]