Linux Partitioning Guide

I use Fedora Linux as my primary desktop OS. Every time there is a fresh install, I find myself confounded on how to partition the OS. So I thought I might as well make a permanent note of how I do it so that I always have a place to come back to. Partitioning Scheme This is how I partition my Fedora during installation: Partition Mounted On Size Encrypted Filesystem Boot /boot 512M No ext4 Boot EFI /boot/efi 200M No vfat Swap - 1.5 times the RAM Yes swap Home /home 265G Yes ext4 Root / 211G No ext4 Encryption Note that Swap and Home partitions have to be encrypted. Swap extends the RAM and can have a sensitive copy of RAM data like passwords, keys, etc. Hence always ensure to encrypt the Swap partition. Home partition is equally essential to be encrypted because this is where your data will live. Things like configuration, SSH keys, GPG keys, API keys are all stored in the home in various directories. So it is of utmost importance that you encrypt these two directories. ...

January 11, 2021 Â· 2 min Â· Suraj Deshmukh

Book Review: How to Take Smart Notes

Introduction How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers by Sönke Ahrens is a small (171 pages) non-fiction genre book. The book is a manual explaining Zettlekasten method designed by Niklas Luhmann. Sönke has used straightforward and simple English to explain the concepts. For anyone who is a knowledge curator or wishes to publish non-fictional content in any form (text, video or audio), this book is a must-read. I came across this book when I was watching a video by Ali Abdaal named “How I Remember Everything I Read”. Here he explains various levels of note-taking, how this book has influenced his note-taking capabilities and the foremost reason for making the video. I saw the book wasn’t that huge, I bought it and started reading immediately. ...

November 28, 2020 Â· 7 min Â· Suraj Deshmukh

Book Review: Algorithms to Live by — The Computer Science of Human Decisions

Introduction The book “Algorithms to Live by — The Computer Science of Human Decisions” is written by “Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths”. It fits into the genre non-fiction, psychology and computer science. The book is written lucidly. If you have a background in computer science, then this book is easy to follow. The book creates analogies of computer science algorithms with real-life situations. I felt that some metaphors sound good in reading than their application, so if you plan on applying the things explained in the book directly to your life, they might not work. Because real-life has a lot of constraints that can be simplified in a computer algorithm to solve a problem, so the algorithms don’t apply vis-à-vis. ...

October 11, 2020 Â· 6 min Â· Suraj Deshmukh

How to gracefully kill Kubernetes Jobs with a sidecar?

Have you ever had a sidecar in your Kubernetes Job? If no, then trust me that you are lucky. If yes, then you will have the frustration of your life. The thing is Kubernetes Jobs are meant to exit on completion. But if you have a long-running sidecar, then that might twist things for Kubernetes and in turn of you. Why would you even want a sidecar for Job? Well, one of the most prevalent use case is when using service mesh proxy. There could be something else as well like metrics endpoint, log collection or whatever. Given the complexity and heterogeneity of the workloads, there could be any kind of use case that involves having sidecar for a Job pod. ...

August 29, 2020 Â· 6 min Â· Suraj Deshmukh

Use Configmap for Scripts

We generally use some sort of scripts in application container images. They serve various purposes. Some scripts might do an initial setup before the application starts, others may have the whole logic of the container image, etc. Whatever the goal may be the general pattern is to copy the script into the container image, build the image and then the script is available when you consume the image. Cons of the Traditional Method The round trip time during development and testing of such script is very long. You make some change to the script, you need to build the image, push it and then it is downloaded again. On an average for every change adds a couple of minutes to your feedback loop. Bash scripts are generally precarious in nature. You have to hammer it down, consider edge cases and thereby make it robust. This, of course, takes a lot of iterations. And with iterations comes the added time. So the question is, how do we reduce this feedback loop? ...

August 22, 2020 Â· 6 min Â· Suraj Deshmukh

Being Productive with Git

Contents Introduction Bash Aliases Configuration Installation Global Git Configuration Configuration Installation Repository Specific Git Settings Configuration Installation Bash Git Prompt Configuration Installation Git Push PR Reviews Configuration Installation Demo Conclusion Introduction Git is a day to day tool for version control. It has become a de facto method of source code versioning, it has become ubiquitous with development and its an essential skill for a programmer. I use it all the time. ...

August 16, 2020 Â· 5 min Â· Suraj Deshmukh

Being Productive with Kubectl

This blog will showcase my productivity tips with kubectl . This does not venture into any plugins per se. But only using bash aliases to achieve it. Bash Aliases # k8s alias alias k=kubectl alias kg="kubectl get" alias kgp="kubectl get pods" alias kgs="kubectl get services" alias kge="kubectl get events" alias kgpvc="kubectl get pvc" alias kgpv="kubectl get pv" alias kd="kubectl describe" alias kl="kubectl logs -f" alias kc="kubectl create -f" I have above aliases setup in the ~/.bashrc file. The beauty of the aliases is that you can append more flags and parameters to the existing smaller alias. For, e.g. I have an alias for kubectl get pods as kgp, but if I want to get pods from all the namespaces, I use kgp -A. ...

August 2, 2020 Â· 3 min Â· Suraj Deshmukh