Blog | mbtamuli's scratchpad

Route VPN Traffic

My personal laptop, my beloved Dell XPS 15, broke down. The SSD was not being detected. Fixing it would take time and I thought I’d get it fixed when I less workload. Now as part of my work, I need to connect to a VPN. The VPN solution is Palo Alto’s GlobalProtect VPN 😅 (I’ll rant about GlobalProtect VPN some other time!). I can only connect to the VPN using my Dell XPS as it’s MAC address was registered. I got another laptop lying around(ThinkPad E470), but the process to get this new laptop’s MAC address registered would take around 2 weeks! ...

Backup files to git repo before shutdown

I have a few files that I want to push to a remote repository just before shutdown. It could be many use cases, but mine is, I want my dotfiles synced to mbtamuli/dotfiles. Well, the approach is simple setup a small script to do git push have a systemd service What? You thought there’d be a ton of steps? Sorry to dissapoint. 😁 profit! 😎 Create another file and do whatever you need /usr/local/bin/backup_work.sh ...

Why Functional Programming Matters

This article will be my take on why functional programming matters, largely with a focus on the paper with the same name, authored by John Hughes in the year 1984 - Link to the paper. ...

Keeping a Notebook

I recently came across this note and I could agree to all of the reasons mentioned for creating a Notebook. So here it is - /notebook. I have set my own format though, I’ll keep the name of the note as the date, and I’ll put multiple headings to separate the different topics I write about on each day. Some days I might not write anything due to whatever reason, but I will at least put the reason why I have not written, even if it is a single line. ...

Configuring Postfix

I came across this really neat Docker image docker-postfix. It got me up and running with Postfix in a very short amount of time. I’m just mentioning the extra steps I had to take to get the TLS certificates and the DKIM keys. As this is a post of configuring Postfix running as a Docker container, I’ll also run all the setup steps inside containers. First let’s create a directory for all our files and pull all the images ...