Welcome to my Tech Yard

After finishing a comprehensive Docker course, I felt comfortable with container primitives and the security practices around it. But tutorials only get you so far. To internalize these concepts and deepen my understanding, I decided to containerize my personal blog. My blog is already built with Hugo and uses the Papermod theme. Before, I just relied on a standard GitHub Action that compiled the static site and deployed it directly to GitHub Pages and it worked perfectly fine. ...

You’ve probably been running containers the wrong way like me a while ago but still don’t know it yet. Processes inside a container run as root user by default. Here is why this is a security risk and how to fix it. Shared Kernel Unlike Virtual Machines, Docker containers share your host machine’s kernel. The root user inside your container is basically the same root user on your actual computer. ...

2 days ago at NVIDIA GTC, NVIDIA introduced the next evolution of its upscaling and frame generation technology, DLSS 5. This faced immediate reaction and backlash from the gaming community. The community was divided. We even went at it at the Whatsapp groupchat with my friends. Critics labelled it as “AI Slop”, the rendering results showcased by NVIDIA looked “horrible”. From what I noted, this is just a deeper debate on Engineering vs Artistry ...

I recently ran into an issue while trying to ssh into my Raspberry Pi which is a dedicated DNS server for my homelab. The dnsmasq server is configured to listen to the Pi’s IP for incoming DNS requests. If I restarted the service manually systemctl restart dnsmasq, it worked fine. But everytime I rebooted the Pi, the service failed to start. The Pi’s IP is mapped into the name prod.homelab and with the DNS server failing to start, the command ssh [email protected] could not work since the client machine could not resolve the name prod.homelab. I had to ssh using the IP Address. ...

It has been a few days so far learning about containers and I’m fascinated by the advances they bring in the tech industry. Containers revolutionalized the development, testing and deployment of applications. Before containers, teams would develop applications locally on their machines and ship the application to the operations team. Developers needed to specify the dependancies together with their versions and environment configurations for this application to run successfully on other machines e.g the production servers. This would sometimes be a lot of work writing all the requirements needed for a specific application to run and on the other end, the operations team would make mistakes in configuring the environment and the app fails to run. This would lead to conflicts between the two teams with the developer saying “It was working on my end”. With containers, teams utilize an image which is a portable package which has all the requirements required to run an application and it is spun up with a container. ...

I’ve always assumed HTTPS as “encryption” or “securing” data in a network like many of devopers out there but that’s just half of the story. HTTPS is actually two things combined: Encryption - Securing data so that other people can’t read it. Authentication - Proving that the intended server is really who it claims to be. This is the major part of HTTPS according to my experience when I just set up HTTPS in my homelab. Here is a simple high-level explanation on how HTTPS works. ...

Its been a few days since I started a simple homelab with a raspberry PI and an old laptop lying around. The first objectives of this project have been practicing networking fundamentals such as IP addresses, subnets, DNS, and security practices such as firewalls and ssh hardening. Other concepts/experiments will build on these foundations as the homelab advances into complex stages of learning cloud native technologies. The homelab is currently hosted on github with proper documentation of what I’ve been doing in a clear structured way. I believe this is a great way of learning than endless watching of tutorials on YouTube without actions. I get my hands dirty here by experimenting different approaches and analysing the “whys”. ...

This afternoon as I was taking a break, I came across a good youtube video here explaining what exactly a server is. “A server is not just a physical computer, it’s a role that a computer takes; because any ordinary desktop computer can be set up as a server, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be a powerful computer.” - That’s a bar References

Finally, I have decided to render my DevOps notes on a site powered by Hugo and Hextra and deployed it using github pages. This is what I call My Kasten, a German word meaning a crate or a container. It will act as my Second Brain where I will document everything I will be learning. The purpose of this is that I believe it will help me in the future or anyone else who will find it useful to refer to something. ...

Recently, I crossed a major milestone, I landed my first freelance contract for a local startup NGO doing good work. They needed digital presence. I built them a site and integrated a Content Management System that the admin can use to draft content they want to display on the website and the site builds and deploys automatically References