Setting Up an OpenVPN Server on CentOS

Nov 26, 2021

The Background Recently I’ve set up an OpenVPN (Community Edition 2.4.11) server on a CentOS 7 box. While there were multiple1 resources2 that3 helped4 immensely in getting the task done, below is the process that was actually followed. Configuring EasyRSA and Generating the Server Keys Once we have a CentOS 7 box up and running, we can start by enabling the EPEL repository and optional extras. yum install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm subscription-manager repos --enable "rhel--optional-rpms" --enable "rhel--extras-rpms" --enable "rhel-ha-for-rhel-*-server-rpms" Then, we can install openvpn and easy-rsa5 as below.…

Adding a Program to Gnome Dock in Ubuntu

Nov 14, 2021

The backgroud I recently installed Ubuntu 20.04 LTS on a machine where I needed a solid and friendly OS1. I also wanted to install a couple programs including Lite XL2 and VS Code3 among others, and decided to use the pre-built binaries and setup them in a portable manner. For VS code, extracting the gzipped tar and creating an empty ‘data’ directory inside the extracted directory is the way to go.…

Updating Instance Properties of an existing Google Compute Engine Virtual Machine

Oct 31, 2021

The background When IP forwarding is disabled (default) for a virtual machine instance in the Google Compute Engine, Google Cloud performs strict source and destination checking for packets so that VM instances can only send packets whose sources are set to match an internal IP address of its interface in the network. Also, packets are only delivered to an instance if their destination match the IP address of the instance’s interface in the network.…

Annoyance by Ignorance

Jun 30, 2021

Today morning I installed KDE Neon to a VirtualBox VM. I’ve used both Kubuntu and Neon previously as the primary OS at different points in my time at uni. Tinkering with the desktop visuals until you’ve done that for the better part of a week only to do the same in the next as well is the sign of having a good aesthetic1 taste ;) This time, it was mainly for the solid Linux experience that I set up the VM.…

Uploading Artifacts in a Github Actions Workflow

Jun 27, 2021

While I initially thought figuring this out would be a time consuming task, it turned out to be pretty straighforward thanks to the helpful documentation with examples avaialable on the topic. The use case for me was to upload a gzipped tar of a SQLite database file (few KBs) from a workflow that is scheduled to run once everyday. Following workflow is geard toward the task. # This workflow saves the db.…

Automating Deployment of a Django site with GitHub Actions

May 30, 2021

The background Recently after I finished buiding an appointment scheduler in PHP1 without a framework (result: assignment-grade product), I’ve decided to learn Django for many reasons, being an SRE intern one of them. Going through a brilliant module on MDN2 gave me an awesome head start toward that end. Then I though of building an appointment scheduler again, but this time with Django in Python. While the experience so far has been great, in this post let’s only discuss about what’s in the title : )…

Automating Deployment of a Hugo Site to GitHub Pages with GitHub Actions

May 26, 2021

GitHub, GitHub, What? Well, I’m not affiliated, by the way ;P GitHub pages is a service freely available for all GH users to host static sites from their repositories. GH actions (also free, as in free lemonade) lets users automate software workflows (think CI/CD). What we’ll be doing is automating the deployment of a Hugo site in a GH repository to GH pages. Setting up the source Once we have a Hugo site set up1, we’ll need to push this to a repo in GH.…

From Development to Production with a Simple Web Game

Mar 03, 2021

The cause, or lack thereof It all started when we, the interns, were tasked with organizing an event for bringing together the employees of the company in an online event while everyone is working from home. In the meetings (over Teams) that ensued, one thing everyone agreed was that we needed the event to be great-not just good. So, naturally, I built a simple web game implementing the classical Spot-the-difference1 game.…

Shipping a Simple Product

Dec 24, 2020

Creating a simple to-do list webapp I've been thinking of creating something big for some time now. While such endeavors are certainly worth to be pursued, a simple to-do list webapp is the latest I came up with–sometimes you need to just build something. Starting out with an official bootstrap boilerplate, I borrowed multiple elements from a couple other projects from mine to kick-start development. First, I structured the HTML layout without much meddling with JS.…

Parallelizing Pi Approximation with OpenMP

Nov 14, 2020

OpenMP vs POSIX threads Both are APIs for shared-memory programming. In C, OpenMP is a relatively high-level extension, providing compiler directives for parallelizing many programs with ease while some low-level thread interactions may be difficult to program. Pthreads provide some low-level coordination constructs that are unavailable in OpenMP, making other programs easier to parallelize while requiring explicit specification of the behavior of each thread, which may virtually be any that is conceivable.…