https://www.suriar.net/ Recent content on Murali's Musings Hugo -- gohugo.io en Wed, 25 May 2022 11:00:00 +0100 https://www.suriar.net/posts/onboarding-and-mentoring/ Wed, 25 May 2022 11:00:00 +0100 https://www.suriar.net/posts/onboarding-and-mentoring/ Another week, another blog courtesy of the CodingBlocks Slack. Steven Leadbeater asked this set of questions: Has anyone ever taken a step back from code to run a team of juniors? Is it possible to maintain your output by proxy in the early days of full time junior coaching? Can anyone who’s done this offer any advice, pitfalls to look out for or upsides I might not be thinking of? https://www.suriar.net/posts/on-toil/ Fri, 13 May 2022 14:01:24 +0100 https://www.suriar.net/posts/on-toil/ (Well - this is a bit of a random way to get back to blogging. See endnotes1 for more details.) This is some commentary/exposition in response to CodingBlocks episode 184, which is a podcast review of the Eliminating Toil chapter of the Site Reliability Engineering(SRE) book. This isn’t going to be an end to end review - you should listen to the podcast and/or read the book chapter for that. Rather I’m going to call out and clarify specific points based on my understanding and experience. https://www.suriar.net/posts/new-blog-hosting/ Sun, 02 Dec 2018 12:20:00 +0000 https://www.suriar.net/posts/new-blog-hosting/ Previously I concluded that the thing that I most care about is the ability to host content. I don’t care about comments, nor do I care about a shiny WYSIWYG editor - in fact, I’ve become habituated to writing plaintext MarkDown. This led me to conclude that rather than using a platform like Blogger, I could likely get by with a static site generator. This has the additional benefit of additional portability, since I just need someone who can host static HTML. https://www.suriar.net/posts/back-again/ Thu, 25 Oct 2018 19:00:00 +0000 https://www.suriar.net/posts/back-again/ So, here I am again. The impending demise of Google+ has led me to search out a new place for posting long-form content and collections of interesting links. There are some promising alternatives out there, but I realised that mostly what I wanted was the ability to log stuff that I’ve read and done over the course of a week somewhere that I can come back and reference later. So, here I am again. https://www.suriar.net/posts/fosdem-2014/ Thu, 06 Feb 2014 19:36:00 +0000 https://www.suriar.net/posts/fosdem-2014/ This past weekend, I and several others made our way to ULB for FOSDEM 2014. FOSDEM is an annual conference aimed at the free and open source software communities. In addition to talks on a wide variety of topics, it doubles as a convenient place and time for developers on projects who are spread all over the world to meet up in person. I attended a bunch of talks over the weekend; below is a brief list and some impressions based on my recollections and notes. https://www.suriar.net/posts/openjdk-hackday/ Mon, 20 Jan 2014 00:14:00 +0000 https://www.suriar.net/posts/openjdk-hackday/ Since I am currently possessed of an excess of free time, I’m always looking for events to participate in which will be entertaining and/or educational. Yesterday, this led me to attend a hackday run by the London Java Community. These hackdays are based around OpenJDK, the reference implementation for Java Standard Edition. People generally work on whatever they like (it is a hackday, after all), but one of the main goals of these regular hackdays is to provide an environment where neophytes to OpenJDK development can try and start making contributions. https://www.suriar.net/posts/global-day-of-code-retreat-2013/ Sun, 15 Dec 2013 00:12:00 +0000 https://www.suriar.net/posts/global-day-of-code-retreat-2013/ Have you heard of Coderetreats? I hadn’t until a couple of weeks ago, when a friend of mine prompted me to try one. From the About page: Coderetreat is a day-long, intensive practice event, focusing on the fundamentals of software development and design. By providing developers the opportunity to take part in focused practice, away from the pressures of ‘getting things done’, the coderetreat format has proven itself to be a highly effective means of skill improvement. https://www.suriar.net/posts/tmux-and-vim-for-scheme-development/ Tue, 03 Dec 2013 13:48:00 +0000 https://www.suriar.net/posts/tmux-and-vim-for-scheme-development/ I’m currently working my way through Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, as a lot of people I know speak very highly of it as a text on the craft of programming. It uses the Scheme programming language, a dialect of Lisp. Most tools for developing in Lisp and Scheme (e.g. SLIME) are based around the emacs text editor. Without going down the rabbit hole, suffice it to say that I’m a vim user, and wanted an alternative. https://www.suriar.net/posts/network-notes/ Tue, 03 Dec 2013 00:27:00 +0000 https://www.suriar.net/posts/network-notes/ As mentioned previously, my good intentions to blog as I learned interesting stuff didn’t survive contact with my new employer. Now that I’m unemployed, I’m going to be writing more frequently here; the main intention is for this to be a memory aid, but if other people find this stuff interesting, so be it. First up: in preparation for my Google interviews, I put together some revision notes on some fundamentals of networking, which may be of more general use. https://www.suriar.net/posts/changing-plans/ Sat, 12 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.suriar.net/posts/changing-plans/ I’m writing this from the quayside having just watched my crew sail away. Best of luck guys - sorry I’m not with you. It’s a little strange being sat here - as most people know, I was planning to go the whole way round the world on this year’s Clipper race. However, between the sailing, cooking, cleaning and everything else, the last 31 days at sea have given me a lot of time to reflect. https://www.suriar.net/posts/blogging-is-hard/ Sat, 08 Jun 2013 11:29:00 +0000 https://www.suriar.net/posts/blogging-is-hard/ Alternatively, it’s entirely possible that I’m just lazy and/or easily distracted. I started this blog intending to record all the various things I was studying, due to a lack of technical challenge at work. Things didn’t really go as planned. A lot has happened in the almost 3 years(!) since I’ve last published a post here; however two things in particular stand out. Firstly: new job. In May 2010, I joined Google Dublin as a network engineer. https://www.suriar.net/posts/multiple-ssh-identities-beware/ Tue, 27 Jul 2010 12:08:00 +0000 https://www.suriar.net/posts/multiple-ssh-identities-beware/ One of my jobs required me to make use of a number of SSH keys for access to various different systems. This was a new experience for me; previous employers as well as university had made extensive use of Kerberos/GSSAPI. I modified my shell’s startup fies to load the appropriate keys into my agent using ssh-add on login, and promptly forgot all about it. The Symptoms This worked seamlessly for some time, with me adding keys to the list as I was granted access to new systems. https://www.suriar.net/posts/gnu-make-a-very-short-introduction/ Fri, 11 Dec 2009 02:48:00 +0000 https://www.suriar.net/posts/gnu-make-a-very-short-introduction/ I finally got sick and tired of having a slightly different command line environment in each of the Linux/UNIX environments I use. This led me to put some effort into collating my various dotfiles (for bash, vim and screen) and coming up with a consolidated version of each, tracked using git, that I could install on any machine which I had a unique home directory on and not have to remember which of my preferences I’ve configured on this particular machine. https://www.suriar.net/posts/lab-machines-on-the-cheap/ Fri, 11 Dec 2009 01:37:00 +0000 https://www.suriar.net/posts/lab-machines-on-the-cheap/ While my Linux/UNIX skills as a user are fairly good, my administration skills are virtually non-existent. I know how to su - and apt-get, but installing a production system from scratch and understanding how to put a secure, stable OS build together are well beyond my ken. My BSD knowledge is… limited, to say the least. Fortunately, all of the above lend themselves quite neatly to the use of virtual machines; there’s a lot to be said for being able to install a fresh operating system into a clean environment, play with it and break it to your heart’s content and then wipe the slate clean when you’re finished. https://www.suriar.net/posts/why-a-blog/ Sun, 06 Dec 2009 23:41:00 +0000 https://www.suriar.net/posts/why-a-blog/ In an outbreak of random motivation, I’ve decided to start keeping a blog. The main goal is to help me keep track of the various things I’m attempting to learn about, most of which are technological. If this ends up being useful to other people, then so much the better. Things that interest me, and will be covered at some point (I hope): IT infrastructure Data networks UNIX/Linux/BSD Scalability High availability Managing large environments For another perspective, behold my bookshelf of ‘stuff to read’, as of a year ago. https://www.suriar.net/about/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.suriar.net/about/ About Me Lapsed computer scientist, turned network engineer, turned SRE. Opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent the views of any of my employers, past or present. Work Currently SRE/production engineering at Snowflake. Previously Storage systems at Google (Chubby, D) Software defined networking at Google (Espresso, Jupiter, Orion) Traffic management at Google (DNS, maglev, GFE, GSLB) Outside work Conferencees Organising Co-chair, SREcon EMEA 2019 Program committee member, multiple previous SREcons FOSDEM networking team Speaking TODO Trivia Once left Google to get on a boat.