Linux

by Kulbir Saini on Challenge, Computers, Fedora, Fun, Hacking, Internet, LAN, Life, Linux, Servers, Yum

Task List this summer

Though almost 25% of vacations are already gone, I thought of writing down my task list this summer. Maybe somebody out there have any suggestions.

  1. Squid Documentation/Tutorials  – Status : DONE
  2. IPTables Tutorial – Status : In progress.
  3. Firewall And Proxy Server Tutorial – Status : Todo
  4. Policy Routing with Linux – Status : Todo
  5. IPRoute2 Howto – Status : Todo
  6. Linux Advanced Routing and Traffic Control Howto – Status : Todo
  7. IntelligentMirror Development – Status : In progress.

Though I didn’t opt for a project or btp in networks, I am trying to focus on real life networking which I can use to make my life easier with the damn wireless. Like learning squid was a wonderful experience and now I get 25% of the stuff I browse from my own cache 🙂

Happy Summer Vacations,

Bordeaux 😀

 
by Kulbir Saini on Life, Linux, Windows

Live and Let Live

Long time no see!!! Well, I was really busy learning some new things and managing my new desktopS. Yes desktops. You read it right. Next post is going to be on my two desktops. Ok. Now I’ll concentrate on the motive of writing this post.

Three years ago, I joined IIIT with a blank mind in Computer Science. Me and few others tried to excell in using/managing/hacking/cracking/breaking computers while others tried to do their best in academics. Sounds good. By burning midnight oil almost everyday since the very first semester, I learnt a bit of tricks to fix certain hardware/software problems. People used to ask me to fix problems for them related to all this stuff. Back then it was fun and I really liked helping others. Be it a windows or a linux problem, if I knew the crack, I never denied someone asking for help.

But as time passed, more and more people started coming with more problems. Even hardware problems. And the traffic was highest in the beginning of the third semester when almost everyone bought a laptop in my batch and making wifi work in linux at that point of time was a bit tricky. Even then I never mind because I didn’t have any commitments to work on back then. I was free all the time and loved to help people.

I think I can say that buying a cellphone just with the intention that I would be in contact with my family was the biggest mistake of my life at IIIT. I have 3 freaking projects to work on and people don’t let me concentrate on them. If I don’t reply to mails or IMs, they shamelessly start calling me. I mean wtf, at times I may be trying to get the hang of something really important related to my work and the FUCKING call damages all the spirit. It still looks somewhat justified when someone asks me about some problem related to Linux. Dudes are coming with problems related to Windows Vista. I never used the fucking OS. I HATE WINDOWS. I hope you can feel the heat and my concern regarding my commitments.

Please for god sake don’t ask me for help at least related to windows. Though I would love to help you fixing any problem with your Linux system, but sometime I may be busy with other things that are more important to me. If I don’t reply to your mail or IM, please for God sake don’t call!!! And moreover, if you want to call, please don’t call between 08:00AM – 05:00PM and let me sleep peacefully. Its a request.

 
by Kulbir Saini on Life, Linux, Yum

I Feel Good

I have been posting a lot recently. But I am just doing all this to remember all these things few years down the line 🙂 To remember the things that makes me feel good.

I have been working on Yum and Drupal since 3 months now. I have learnt a lot about drupal in these three months. I am a drupal module developer now and also have written a new module which is inspired from a couple of existing modules but make things really simple 🙂 I also submitted a patch for one of the contributed modules.

As knowledge of Yum is necessary for my BTP, I am quite involved in testing the latest release and trying to get started with yum development. I am trying to learn the yum internals and the yum plugin development. To get started with yum plugin development, I picked up an existing plugin fastestmirror and wrote documentation for it. Few days back I submitted the documentation patch on yum-devel list and it is included in the latest release of fastestmirror. Here is the changelog. Apart from this I have also sent 2-3 small patches on yum-devel.

I have come a long way this semester. This semester was almost free. Only 6 classes and a tutorial per week. I was able to focus more on open source and now I feel good that I have finally started contributing to open source 🙂

 
by Kulbir Saini on Computers, Life, Linux

Panic Mode

I have been writing blog posts about linux since last two and a half years now. I wrote most of them because I faced difficulties in installing or configuring or using open source softwares and keeping in mind that others may be facing the same problems. And it has come a long way now. My linux blog gets more than 5000 hits a month and 75% of the visitors come via google search(src. google analytics) who are searching for howtos on different topics.

Sometime people write me asking questions about configurations and related things. I received a mail from a guy in uk who read some post on my linux blog and felt like helping me in some way. While I received his mail, I was in panic mode. Because I broke a module on one of my production servers and I was not able to fix it even after trying for hours continuously. IRC and google didn’t help and at the same time a guy in IRC really frustrated me with his behavior while helping. So, I didn’t care about the mail from the guy from uk and replied in really hurry and in a really bad manner. I didn’t even consider what I was writing. I usually reply to a mail whenever I get it. I don’t like to wait for replying.

After sometime I got the reply saying that he was trying to help me and I had been very rude in my reply. I just read the sent mail again and found it really hard to believe that I sent it. I replied with apologies and everything was fine after wards. It was embarrasing to know that I hurt stranger at a remote place. Now onwards, don’t reply to a mail while in panic mode 🙂

PS : Tough night. It took a really long time to fix a small problem 🙂

 
by Kulbir Saini on Computers, Fun, Life, Linux

Last Week Report

Its 7 am and again its the same raga. I can’t sleep 😛 I was trying to sleep since an hour now. I got up and thought of posting some more crap on the Internet. It was a very busy week for me. I wrote a lot of text which includes noting down the minutes of meetings, writing and replying to RFCs, writing wiki pages, writing blog post and replying to a lot of mails.

Last week students lab committee met network security audit team. The meeting went for 3 long hours, but we had a lot of discussions. Most of the discussions were positive and I am really optimistic about the improvements in performance of network in near future. I volunteered for writing down the minutes of meeting for such a long meeting 🙁 It took me more than 40minutes to write down the minutes of meeting.

As a part of my BTP, I am thinking of adopting an open source project and thinking of developing it during forthcoming summer. It would be real fun. For this I wrote my first ever RFC. It here if you wanna read it.

After that I created a wiki page on fedoraproject.org for the same. Its here.

I prepared a BTP report of 9 long pages. It took me around 3-4 hours. I still don’t believe I did it myself 🙂 Prepared a BTP presentation and that too myself. It consumed 2 hours of my time. I don’t know why we have to submit 10 page long BTP report. Every BTP may not be same and for some projects you can’t really write that long report. I could not really figure out what to write and wrote about a lot of related stuff to make it 9 page long. I think I could never understand some academic rules.

I wrote this “how to make a hollow iron sphere” blog post. I wrote it just for fun. But people got emotional and started proposing the solutions. And it turned out to be a patent :-O

2-3 Days back I met Dr. PJN regarding some of the network issues. We had a long discussion on some of the issues which includes setting up caches for proxy, deploying proxy authentication, mail forwarding issue and some other. It was a long meeting again. I wrote down the minutes of the meeting for this one as well. It took me around 30 minutes.

Day before yesterday, we had a students lab committee meeting for coming up with some solution to improve network performance. Again the same discussion. Meeting went on for more than one hour. This time also, I wrote down the minutes of the meeting. Again the same things with changed opinions.

And right now I am writing this blog since last 20 minutes 🙂

PS1 : Getting busy. Trying to cut down time wastage.

PS2 : Somebody please help me to get rid of checking mails every 1 minute 🙁 Its a real obstacle in production.

PS3 : Thanks smr for sharing this on google reader 🙂

PS4 : Guyz checkout this. ORB is going wild 🙂

 
by Kulbir Saini on Computers, Hacking, Life, Linux, Programming

My Geek Code Block …

—–BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK—–
Version: 3.1
GCS>/E/M d? s:>+:+ a19 C++++ UL++>++++ P+>++++ L+++>++++
E—>+++ W++ N+ !o K- w>– O– !M V- PS PE Y–
PGP—>+ !t !5 X R tv- b+ DI- D+ G++ e>++ h r- y–
——END GEEK CODE BLOCK——

I found this geek code block very instersting. Making a geek code block is a real fun of almost one hour. You can also make one for you. check it out here …

 
by Kulbir Saini on Computers, Hacking, Life, Linux

My Nerd Score …

I am nerdier than 94% of all people. Are you nerdier? Click here to find out!

I took this test from http://unpredictablerulz.wordpress.com . I was asked questions from science that I forgot a long time back after giving the competitive xams for the engg. entrance. i cant believe that i was given this score. neway it was a good test .

 
by Kulbir Saini on Computers, Life, Linux

My first post …

Till now i was just posting about linux. well its my first post about my life through graduation at IIIT Hyderabad. Well this post starts with a shock that we’ll not be having sysadmins anymore here at IIIT. I m praying for any courses that may be there beyond MS in our college so that THE nirnimesh may continue as sysadmin at our college. Its very sad not to have student sysadmins.
Its not long i know nirnimesh , but he is a very co-operative kinda person. Never got irretate. I remember each n every mail i sent to him ereporting the mail as spam, or reporting some problem with my mail account. Everytime he replied very calmly. And last but not the least, he is a linux geek too. Well it’ll very difficult to report problems to frequently to the new sysadmin. But truely speaking no one cant take his place or i shud say none else deserve to be at his place.

…..