David - Musings of an SRE

While working on multi-homing my ASN network earlier to add Vultr as my secondary upstream, I ran into an issue where my traffic coming out of my Vultr BGP session was seen as coming from Vultr’s IP instead of my own static IP prefix.

After planning for this for a while, I finally found some time yesterday to finish hooking up my network to support multi-home.

Just started to take a more visual approach to feeding my dopamine-starved brain by tracking my goals to keep me motivated each day.

Growing up, I’ve always felt like I needed something to dedicate my life to.

Just last month, after at least 6 years of avoiding medication by convincing my different doctors that I am in the middle of working of lifestyle changes to bring my cholesterol down, I’ve decided to admit to myself that the charades is up.

Some notes of my own experience publishing my Obsidian Vault with Quartz and Fyra.

Some of my friends know this, I have an addiction.

Now Playing on IRC Back in the IRC days of the late 90s and early 2000s, chat was full of people sharing the songs they were playing on their media players.

When I first saw videos of the Silverstone FLP02 ATX case unveiled at Computex 2025 early this year, I knew I just had to get it.

My Desktop’s PSU recently caught fire while running a local LLM task and some intensive gaming.

The Problem That Kept Me Up at Night Picture this: you’re running a DNS service that handles over 100 queries per second.

A friend recently asked me why I still buy old datacenter SSDs (some over 10 years old) instead of brand-new consumer ones.

Running a ZFS boot pool for your Proxmox system can lead to unexpected boot issues if you do not copy the bootloaders after replacing a disk that failed.

Moving my Dell R630 from my previous rack to a new rack in a new physical location was supposed to be a quick affair but it wouldn’t power on after the relocation.

[Update 2026]: Ready to deploy that Hugo site?

If you’ve ever worked with Amazon SNS and subscribed an HTTP/HTTPS endpoint, you’ve probably hit this gotcha: SNS sends you a JSON payload… but sets the Content-Type header to text/plain. 🤨 Why Is That a Problem?

Running a beta is weird.

Context I am currently working on a new simple email hosting product targeting solopreneurs and hobbyists and have been building out my own smtp server for this purpose.

Some days, I find myself feeling deeply disillusioned about the things I’ve been building, questioning whether I’ve just been deluding myself into thinking they were useful.

In our recent trip to Shanghai, our family stayed at Hyatt Regency Wujiaochang throughout our stay and we enjoyed it.

I was doing some keyword searching for Ping Everything Everywhere All At Once recently and found a few keywords that might be interesting to compete for SEO wise.

When working on a single or bi-directional GRPC stream, the client needs to manage retries themselves when a stream loses connection due to disconnects.

These are my notes on how I migrated a user account from Cpanel to Directadmin (Reseller/Admin) Prerequisite Access to your Cpanel Access to your DirectAdmin panel as an Admin/Reseller Backup your Cpanel In Cpanel, search for “Backup” and perform a Full B…

Background Kubernetes versions <v1.24 has been deprecated and removed from the official kubernetes pckage repositories.

The following might be useful for those who want to disable their systemd services from logging into /var/log/syslog but still maintain the ability to view the logs via journalctl -u <service> Caveat: Unfortunately journal and syslog are quite coupled tog…

Just the other day, I had a hardware failure on one of my servers.

Weekly Notes An even slower week then the previous week.

Weekly Notes Slower week this week.

Weekly Notes Currently thinking of setting up a GeoDNS service so that I can serve my stateless sites like Ping Everything Everywhere All At Once’s API server closer to the request.

Just the other day I found out one of my sites newsletters.love was having a bit of a slowdown.

Weekly Notes This week was a relatively slower week as I was down with the flu.

This guide is tested only up to Grafana 7.5 Background Since Grafana v7.0.0, PhantomJS support has been removed causing the image rendering of dashboard panel and alert image snapshots have been delegated out to [Grafana Image Renderer plugin] or remote r…

Weekly Notes This week, I have been toying with a new idea for a SaaS product targeted at solo entrepreneurs and small startup owners who want to quickly open up an email channel to receive feedback but don’t want to spend time (and money) configuring and…

Just caught this article When privacy expires: How I got access to tons of sensitive citizen data after buying cheap domains during my morning lobste.rs read.

I love how both Slack and Discord has a way to make use of the OAuth2 flow to directly retrieve webhooks urls that we can use to send out their messages.

ICQ is closing, thank you for the memories.

As a developer who loves Vim’s efficiency and minimalist approach, I’ve often found myself in situations where I would use emojis to add some color and personality in either my blog posts, or when building outputs in my CLI tools.

Hello everyone!

When facing a “Too Many Open Files” error, it is normally a result of a process taking up too many file descriptors.

While migrating this blog from Jekyll to Hugo, I found I needed to replace all my old markdown posts which has my title params using single-quotes which Hugo does not appreciate, to double-quotes.

Hackerdrinks Friends Andy Emmanuel Zane

Hello 👋 Hi, I’m David 🌏 I live in the GMT+8 timezone 💼 I’m a 15 YoE backend, infra, SRE, currently taking a short sabbatical to try to build a business 🏡 I run my own Autonomous System (ASN) with most of my projects, running on servers hosted in my homelab

The signal pattern can be used to ensure your long-lived processes (ie. servers) are able to handle signals being sent to the process. import ... type Handler struct { } func (h *Handler) ServeHTTP(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) { w.Write([]byte(…

Sending your structs across the wire and receiving them on the other side.

Openshift’s S2i (Source-2-image) is an alternative framework to buildpacks which uses Dockerfiles and Openshift to create applications out of reproducible container images from source.

One of the coolest stuff I’ve picked up just today is that you can keep environment variables that you want to be loaded into every deployment pod in a neatly configured ConfigMap or Secret which gets injected back into the Pod during deploys.

Short Answer, you can’t.

Using Vault’s Audit Backend to send logs to a remote Syslog server.

How to setup Prometheus AlertManager and get a whole alerting pipeline setup.

When you run out of diskspaces and need to delete files quickly to recover them, most of the time, your deleted files will not free up the diskspace until the process that is using it is restarted or deleted.