Recent content on sahilister's Reimagined Doodle
Weekly notes is a genre where people chronicle their week on their blogs. Weekly notes are like a window. I love going through these, as they’re a steady stream of week on week happenings and progress in people’s lives. It shows people making efforts to improve: from basic things like learning to swim or drive, to planning long-term goals such as vacations, moving house, states, or…
It started with a thought: to understand people’s perspectives on life and its meaning. So I texted folks, “What is life (to you)?”. Each of the following list items (-) is a response from a different individual, mostly verbatim. - A lot - Everyone has a few universal basic qualities, and some special qualities. To me life is pursuit of exploring world based on those qualities…
MiniDebConf Kanpur 2026 was held on 14th and 15th March 2026 at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. Having a Debian conference in the North was something many folks wanted. Ravi started the discussion (with IIT Kanpur folks) almost 7 months before the conference. Lots of folks from Debian India joined in organizing the conference, which was nice. All the meeting notes and discussions were…
National Knowledge Network (NKN) is one of India’s main National Research and Educational Network (NREN). The other being, the less prevalent Education and Research Network (ERNET). This post grew out of this Mastodon thread where I kept on adding various public graphs (from various global research and educational entities) that connect with NKN. This was to get some purview about traffic…
Back in December, I was working to help organize multiple different conferences. One has already happened; the rest are still works in progress. That’s when the thought struck me: why so many conferences, and why do I work for them? For most conference discussions now, I just show up without a set role (DebConf is probably an exception to it). It usually involves talking to folks, suggesting…
Here, I tried to collect entities that owned full /8 IPv4 address block(s) in 2025. A more comprehensive and historical list can be found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_address_blocks . 3.0.0.0/8 - Amazon 6.0.0.0/8 - US Department of Defense 7.0.0.0/8 - US Department of Defense 11.0.0.0/8 - US Department of Defense 12.0.0.0/8 - AT&T Services 17.0.0.0/8 - Apple Inc…
MiniDebConf Navi Mumbai 2025 which was MiniDebConf Mumbai, which in turn was the FOSSMumbai x MiniDebian Conference, happened on 13th and 14th December 2025, with a hotel as Day 1 venue and a college on Day 2. Originally planned for the 8th of November, it got postponed to December due to operational reasons. Most of on-ground logistics and other heavy lifting were done by Arya, Vidhya,…
Just like a ship needs an anchor to stabilize and hold it to port, humans too, I feel require anchors to hold them in life. It could be an emotional anchor, a physical anchor or an anchor that stimulates your curiosity. They could be a family member, a friend, a partner or a spiritual being. An anchor holds you and helps you stabilize in stormy weather. An anchor can keep you going or stop you…
There’s this Bollywood movie by the name of Special 26, and I have been wishing all my friends turning 26 with this, hence the name Special 26. There isn’t anything particularly special about turning 26 though I’m realizing I’m closer to 30 than 20 now. The happenings on my birthday and subsequent home visits have made me more grateful and happy for having friends and…
DebConf25 was held at IMT Atlantique Brest Campus in France from 14th to 19th July 2025. As usual, it was preceded by DebCamp from 7th to 13th July. I was less motivated to write this time. So this year, more pictures, less text. Hopefully, (eventually) I may come back to fill this up. Conference IMT Atlantique Main conference area RAK restaurant, the good food place near the venue Bits from DPL…
Okay, here’s the deal, I pushed my first post on Reimagined Doodle - Alias Command , five years ago on July 8th, 2020. Don’t think I ever mentioned that post started out as a Github Gist which I later transferred here seeking a more long-term home on an independent platform. Writing about writings, motivations, and the blog itself has been a recurring theme here over the years. 1 2 3 4…
Recently, Seth Godin wrote in Productivity, AI and pushback : Typesetters did not like the laser printer. Wedding photographers still hate the iphone. And some musicians are outraged that AI is now making mediocre pop music. In the article, Seth connected how AI is increasing productivity and how anything that improves productivity always wins. Nowadays, large language models (LLMs) have become…
In the past few months, I have moved authoritative name servers (NS) of two of my domains ( sahilister.net and sahil.rocks ) in-house using PowerDNS. Subdomains of sahilister.net see roughly 320,000 hits/day across my IN and DE mirror nodes, so adding secondary name servers with good availability (in addition to my own) servers was one of my first priorities. I explored the following options for…
Maharashtra is a state here in India, which has Mumbai , the financial capital of India, as its capital. maharashtra.gov.in is the official website of the State Government of Maharashtra. We’re going to talk about authoritative name servers serving it (and a bunch of child zones under maharashtra.gov.in). Here’s a simple trace for the main domain: $ dig +trace maharashtra.gov.in ; <<>>…
I find the case of the .UA country code top-level domain (ccTLD) interesting simply because of the different name server secondaries they have now. Post Russian invasion, the cyber warfare peaked, and critical infrastructure like getting one side’s ccTLD down would be big news in any case. Most (g/cc)TLDs are served by two (and less likely) by three or more providers. Even in those cases,…
I have a self-hosted XMPP chat server through Prosody. Earlier, I struggled with certificate renewal and generation for Prosody because I have Nginx (for bunch of services) running on the same server which binds to Port 80. Due to this, Certbot wasn’t able to auto-renew (through HTTP validation) for domains managed by Prosody. Now, I have cobbled together a solution to keep both Nginx and…
After finding AlmaLinux mirror sync capacity at Tier 0 (or Tier 1, however you look at it) is around 140 Gbps, I wanted to find source and hierarchy in Debian mirroring systems. There are two main types of mirrors in Debian - Debian package mirrors (for package installs and updates) also known as package archive and Debian CD mirrors (for ISO and other media). Let’s talk about package…
Last Updated on 16/05/2026. List of public mirrors in India. Location discovered basis personal knowledge, traces or GeoIP. Mirrors which aren’t accessible outside their own ASN are excluded. North India Bharat Datacenter - mirror.bharatdatacenter.com ( AS151704 ) Esto Internet - mirrors.esto.network ( AS135817 ) Extreme IX - repo.extreme-ix.org | repos.del.extreme-ix.org ( AS135814 ) Hopbox…
25 the number says well into adulthood. Aviral pointed out that I have already passed 33% mark in my life, which does hit different. I had to keep reminding myself about my upcoming birthday. It didn’t feel like birthday month, week or the day itself. My writings took a long hiatus starting this year. First post came out in May and quite a few people asked about the break. Hiatus had its own…
Last Updated on 11/04/2026. Another one of the ASN list. This turned out longer than I expected (which is good). If you want to briefly understand what is an ASN, my Personal ASNs From India post carries an introduction to it. Now, here’re the Educational and Research Institutions with their own ASN in India, which I could find: AS2697 Education and Research Network AS9885 NKN Internet…
DebConf24 was held in Busan, South Korea, from July 28th to August 4th 2024 and preceded by DebCamp from July 21st to July 27th. This was my second IRL DebConf (DC) and fourth one in total. I started in Debian with a DebConf, so its always an occasion when one happens. This year again, I worked on the fundraising team, working to raise funds from international sponsors. We did manage to raise…
Last Updated on 11/04/2026. Most banks are behind CDNs and DDoS mitigation providers nowadays, though they still hold their own IP space. Was interested in this, so compiled a list from BGP.Tools and Hurricane Electric BGP Toolkit . AS17436 ICICIBANK Ltd, Banking, Mumbai AS24055 Deutsche Bank AG-India Internet AS AS38029 Citibank N.A. - ISP Peering, Chennai, India AS38468 ASN for Yes Bank AS45644…
Recently, Ola started rolling out Ola Maps in their main mobile application, replacing Google Maps, while also offering maps as a service to other organizations. The interesting part for me was the usage of OpenStreetMap (OSM) data along with Ola’s proprietary data sources. Let’s talk about the map data part here. Screenshot of Ola App. OpenStreetMap attribution is shown after clicking…
I keep on going back and correcting bootload of grammatical and other errors in my posts here. I somewhat feel embarrassed how such mistakes slip through when I was proofreading. Back then it was all good and suddenly this mistake cropped up in my text, which everyone might have already noticed by now. A thought just stuck around that. Those mistakes signify that the text is written by a real…
I became interested in Network Time Protocol (NTP) last year after learning how fundamental this protocol is to the functioning of the global Internet. NTP helps synchronize clocks on devices over the Internet, which is essential for secure browsing, timestamping, keeping everyone in sync or just checking what time it is. Computers usually have a hardware real-time clock (RTC) but that deviates…
Last Updated on 21/02/2026. Internet and it’s working are interesting and complex. We need an IP address to connect to the Internet. A group of IP addresses with common routing policy is known as an Autonomous System (AS). Each AS has a globally unique Autonomous System Number (ASN) and is maintained by a single entity or individual(s). Your ISP would have an ASN. IP addresses/prefixes are…
I wrote about my blog writing methodology back April 2021. My writing method has undergone a significant shift now, so thought about writing this update. New blog topics are added to my note-taking app quite frequently now. Occasionally going through the list, I merge topics, change order to prioritize certain topics or purely drop ideas which seems not worth a write-up. Due to this, I have the…
As I’m gearing towards setting up a Free Software download mirror in India, it occurred to me that I haven’t chronicled the work and motivation behind setting up the original mirror in the first place. Also, seems like it would be good to document stuff here for observing the progression, as the mirror is going multi-country now. Right now, my existing mirror i.e.,…
After much procrastination, I have gotten around to complete my DebConf23 (DC23), Kochi blog post. I lost the original etherpad which was started before DebConf23, for jotting down things. Now, I have started afresh with whatever I can remember, months after the actual conference ended. So things might be as accurate as my memory. DebConf23 , the 24th annual Debian Conference, happened in…
Twenty-four is a big number. More than one/fourth (or more) of my life is behind me now. At this point, I truly feel like I have become an adult; mentally and physically. Another year seem to have gone by quickly. I still vividly remember writing 23 and Counting and here I’m writing the next one so soon. Probably the lowest I felt ever on my birthday; with loss of Abraham and on the other hand,…
Man, you’re no longer with us, but I am touched by the number of people you have positively impacted. Almost every DebConf presentations by locals, I saw after you carried how you were instrumental in bringing them there. How you were a dear friend and brother. It’s a weird turn of events, that you left us during one thing we deeply cared and worked towards making possible since the…
DebUtsav Kochi 2023 was held on June 17th, 2023, at Model Engineering College, Thrikkakara, Kochi. This was organized by the team at FOSSMEC with help from Abraham Raji . I first heard about DebUtsav when, in our DebConf India team meeting, Abraham, mentioned that a college in Kochi wants to host a Debian event. As most folks were already engaged in DebConf related stuff, it was mostly he who…
OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a free, open geographic database which is community maintained and directly or indirectly used by corporations and common folks alike. It’s mostly used by privacy centric users, who don’t want to use Google Maps. I’m an avid fan of OpenStreetMap since 2020 and love tracing roads and adding missing areas for it. The idea to have a mapathon in Chandni Chowk…
As the tradition dictates, we at Debian India organised an online release party for the next stable release of Debian, codenamed bookworm on 10th June. The initial discussion started a while back, but we had a planning meeting just 3–4 days before the release party date. As most of us were busy with DebConf or DebUtsav Kochi stuff, we didn’t have time to explore new ideas for events . The…
Today marks the end of my trip at MakeMyTrip. MakeMyTrip or MMT in short was my first full time job post college. As the cliché, I feel like yesterday when Roubal told me about the opening for Quality Assurance engineer at his workplace and I reluctantly, on his insistence, submitted my CV and went through the eventual interviews. To my great surprise, I passed all the time rounds and was an MMT…
I was standing on an elevated metro platform, looking at high rise office buildings. People were walking in the small park nearby, few were working in the office, unbeknown to the one event that I have been actively looking forward to. These high rises office spaces and people returning from work, again made me realize how small I am. The thought that I’m becoming a Debian Developer…
The first MiniDebConf of year 2023 - MiniDebConf Tamil Nadu 2023 or MDC TN23 in short, happened on 28th and 29th of January 2023 in University College of Engineering Viluppuram in Tamil Nadu. It was done with the local GNU/Linux user group - Villupuram GLUG. Officially speaking, MDC TN23 was announced at the closing ceremony for MDC Palakkad 2022 in November of 2022 by VGLUG. I got to know from…
It all started with a discussion that we’ll meet IRL if we have a physical Debian event. A few texts exchanged - we got a venue, we had an organization team, and we were set for an event. This was how MiniDebConf Palakkad 2022 which happened on November 12 to November 13, in NSS College of Engineering Palakkad, Kerala came to be. To give you folks a bit of context, I have been active in…
23 is two years older than 21, when you’re legally allowed to marry in India and one year older than 22, when I came to the realization that I old now, not old age wise but old in some mental sense to me. The age number tells that I’ve become an adult, but inside, it doesn’t feel like it. I still don’t feel like an adult. When I’m at home, mum does my packing, dad…
These are my experiences specific to Delhi Metro and Rapid Metro Gurugram, which I frequent almost daily. Metros in other cities may or may not share these traits. Metro seems to carry almost everyone. I haven’t seen so many people in one place together and such diversity between them. After reading Metronama: Scenes From The Delhi Metro by Rashmi Sadana, I came to the realization that…
A casual talk regarding OpenStreetMap (OSM) with my roommate lead to the discovery that Snapchat uses OpenStreetMap as basemap for their map functionality. It was felt great learning about this development. I was mapping actively since the time I moved to Gurugram with my colleague/roommate. My roommate use to see me doing edits and making roads in OSM. He was curious to know who even uses those…
Had a chance meeting with school juniors few days back. I was out hanging with Rajan, while we by chance met them. All of them were of the same year, a year junior to us and hanging out together. I remembered most of them. Apparently they remembered me too. The interaction was easy going and fun. Aarush was amongst them too, one of my favorites from their batch. Felt joy, they were happy faces…
Navratri is a bi-annual celebration in Hinduism spanning over nine (sometimes eight) days. It is usually celebrated with fasting and ends with various ceremonies. Now, fasting is our topic for this post today. I have been fasting for Navratri once a year, since quite a few years. Due to family traditions, we only do fasting till eighth day, which is called Ashtami . I have some observation on my…
DebConf21 was held online from August 24th to August 28th, 2021. As the tradition dictates, I wanted to jot down the experience for my future self and others, but it kept slipping. Now, as DebConf22, Kosovo looms (and preparations for DebConf23 here in India begins), I feel obliged to quickly write down as much as I can remember. As this year’s DebConf is in-person again, in Kosovo, I…
I always wonder that humans erect walls to keep themselves safe when they’re most vulnerable, ie in their sleep. Walls or something akin gives a feeling of protection. It protects them from natural elements (weather, heat, rain etc.), seems to be a basic human instinct to want to be safe. Eventually, it seems as possession keeps on mounting (as compared to our hunter-gather roots), those…
Stories are windows in someone’s life. The author may find it suitable to open and close it at a juncture, leaving us in a mix of emotions. We may wish it closes at different point or the window is open a little longer to peer what happened with the protagonist, but as the story window open at random it may well close as that. आपका बंटी (Aapka Bunty) by Mannu Bhandari was about a small boy…
Whether it’s life after someone’s death or traffic on a highway, it keeps on going. A small particle, person or writing is just a minute dent in the grand scheme of the universe. Big bang is big or probably the biggest event in comparison to just an exam or a deadline. Everything is relative. A thing that’s worrying can fade as soon as a different, “bigger” issue…
I took the #100DaysToOffload challenge last year, thanks to Jason . The whole concept of #100DaysToOffload challenge was to write 100 posts in the span of 365 days. Now counting this post (which is coming out 365+ some days ;)), I managed to write about 54 posts (starting with this write-up ), a little more than the halfway mark. Initially, I was hesitant to take it up, saying 50 is a more…
Last update: 02/2022, Mastodon v3.4.6 from Docker Hub. This is a quick-wiki for Mastodon , a federated, self-hostable social media software. As the installation was done via docker-compose, it’s more oriented towards it and may see fewer customizations. Table of Content Updates Accounts Instance Info Glossary Quick links Updates Read changelog and instructions from GitHub release page . Now…
A humble appeal to men to please respect women and their consent. It pains me immensely to say that EVERY SINGLE FEMALE FRIEND I came in close contact with has multitudes of horrible stories to tell about happenings of men following, molesting, character assassinating, making unsolicited sexual advances and what not. These were terrible things to hear, and every one of these girls were traumatized…