b>j)΄!Pԫ&;"kB޶}pSVT(wę!j x;-m@JnQ+պכ7MajfJͱ4jѲ撆RxZMz7vIW/dٞТזcZM~ji ߒsQzԠDW3Den"M+/B:-uIJ7j委9p='mANޭ=/B:-n&nUfqxZM~c Ϲ+,&ᾺܢF[(1*" ϒ"Jԧ<;b" "jܢF[x ,!q қ*]/؝27SMcs"ޭDQ/应ܢF_! :s" 7`F+SVTn"IJnQ/应B 4 wD"IJ׭-`S9DrjiEJ߅gJ应矁[xZM~n"IB؃!'Тѕ+(mIKʭ/|ϐܢF[xZMzG %嬩/c[[ apricot – Varun Sinai Priolkar https://varunpriolkar.com My Space on the Internet Sun, 04 Jan 2026 20:47:06 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.0 https://varunpriolkar.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/cropped-cartoon-blowfish-512-263078-1-150x150.png apricot – Varun Sinai Priolkar https://varunpriolkar.com 32 32 117415536 An update about life – APRICOT, work and more https://varunpriolkar.com/2019/10/an-update-about-life-apricot-work-and-more/ https://varunpriolkar.com/2019/10/an-update-about-life-apricot-work-and-more/#respond Wed, 30 Oct 2019 13:37:59 +0000 https://varunpriolkar.com/?p=4038 Read More »]]>

I’m really sorry that I haven’t updated my blog in a while. I do get asked by my audience on what I’m upto. I’ve meant to create this blog post for a while. I hope I can provide some insights.

I got incredibly caught up with work and did have some personal problems so didn’t get enough time to update and maintain my blog. It also did go down a couple of times, without me noticing. I’ve moved it to a much more simpler set-up now(from running BGP+LXD containers+ZFS) so going forward reliability should not be a problem. This post is more about what I’m upto, since I am getting this question a lot recently.

APRICOT 2019 and South Korea trip

APRICOT is an amazing event to go to if you are a network geek. The 2019 version was held in South Korea in February. I was lucky enough to attend the full event. I attended a campus networking workshop and the full conference after that. There were a lot of interesting people from the industry and the whole event was very fun, particularly the RPKI ROA key signing BOF mixed with whiskey 🙂 .

IPv6 only networks(with DNS64 and NAT64) was particularly interesting topic. I did give it a try at home and it did work well, although I am back to IPv4 only network to keep the complexity on home network at the bare minimum. I don’t have native IPv6 at home so have to tunnel it across a VPN.

RPKI ROA key signing BOF. AS132383 has valid ROAs for all prefixes

I also gave a lightening talk about doing BGP with IPv6 on the cheap, related to the blog-post I made here. You will have to start from 54:40 to start at the correct place. It is the first time I’m presenting at a notable event so was a bit nervous. Hopefully I did alright. I want to thank Mark Tinka for giving me the opportunity.

After that there was a lot of sightseeing around Korea. I want to especially thank my friend Dakota for showing me around Seoul. Korea is a beautiful country with wonderful people and I can highly recommend visiting the country. The Visa process was also incredibly easy and straightforward, something which I have had trouble with in the past.

One thing about Korea that was really fascinating was the amazing public transport – from the busses to the metro to the super-fast trains connecting different cities. It all tied in very well together. Most Koreans can’t speak English, but communicating things across wasn’t particularly challenging. One intriguing thing was the large amount of US and Korean military personnel. It is truly a wonderful country and everything including the small details are all done very well.

More on life

I have been tied around at home because of a few personal reasons. I did do a short trip to the outskirts of Mumbai for leisure. Apart from that I was focusing on saving up my finances and investing in quality stocks, in India and abroad. I also got into reading more about investing and philosophy, particularly Nicholas Taleb. I am learning more about Finance and Economics and I find it very intriguing. I am also brushing up my Mathematics, something which I wasn’t very gifted at.

I deleted most of my social media. I still use Twitter, albeit anonymously to follow people I care about and take inspiration from. I found that it has made my life immensely better and freed up time for things I enjoy. Lifting and strength training is something which I particularly enjoy and my lifts have gone up mostly, apart from a few nagging injuries, which I hope go away soon.

I do try to keep up with all the emails and comments I get, but sometimes it can take me a while to respond. Apologies if your query is still stuck in my to reply list.

Travel and future plans

For the coming year I plan to travel to and visit as many countries as I can, while working from there. That would help to keep the cash flows coming in, while keeping the flight travel costs to days spent ratio low. I am planning on an extended trip to Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia soon, provided things fall in place. The most challenging thing about travelling is getting Visas. Going to Mumbai, spending a lot of time and money on a bureaucratic process with no guarantees is all very off-putting. Travel is something which I enjoy. Being stuck at one place is not particularly appealing.

After that I plan to study academics and attend college, but not Computer Science because it isn’t interesting anymore after spending most of my adult and late-teen life working in the field. The hindering factors are my poor Mathematics scores in high school affecting my admission prospects and the fact that I would have to learn Calculus. I see the latter as an interesting challenge.

Hope this post clears the air a bit. I hope I can blog on interesting things more often. Thanks for being patient! 😀 .

]]> https://varunpriolkar.com/2019/10/an-update-about-life-apricot-work-and-more/feed/ 0 4038 Updates to blog – BGP, IPv6, TLS 1.3 and more https://varunpriolkar.com/2018/12/updates-to-blog-ipv6-tls1-3-and-more/ https://varunpriolkar.com/2018/12/updates-to-blog-ipv6-tls1-3-and-more/#comments Sat, 08 Dec 2018 02:19:37 +0000 https://varunpriolkar.com/?p=2493 Read More »]]>

Just wanted to share a few updates about blog and life.

TLS 1.3 with 0-RTT

TLS 1.3 is a new standard of encryption on the web and I have implemented it! This should result in faster load times and improved security for the users. ECDSA certs are enabled too, along with RSA for better performance. All that has helped the website score A+ on Qualys SSL Labs results. Woosh!

A+ on Qualys SSL Labs test. Yay!

All this is possible because of the fantastic Ondřej Surý’s fantastic packages. 0-RTT and HTTP/2 server push is enabled as well. Thanks to my friend Sunit Nandi for making me do this.

Infrastructure as code

This is by far the most useful and important change. Now the entire hosting infrastructure consisting of LXD containers, a Nginx reverse proxy, BGP is entirely handled by Ansible scripts and Gitlab. I can make a change to the code and Jenkins will auto upload and run the code. Periodic backups are automated as well.

Recently a good samaritan informed me of expired TLS certificate on blog

I have had problems with Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates expiring in the past, inspite of automating them mostly due to Python dependency issues. They are now centrally managed with acme.sh and pushed out periodically. All of this allows me to focus on blogging rather than spend time over managing the infrastructure. I also setup monitoring for the same with Uptime Robot and updown.io.

IPv6 and BGP

I’m using 2a0a:b707:1111::/48 block with my AS132383 for blog

As you may know, I recently got hold of /44 and /48 IPv6 blocks. The blog is up on the IP 2a0a:b707:1111:0:bad:babe:a9ed:22. Announced IPv6 block is 2a0a:b707:1111::/48 block with my AS132383. I’m hosting everything at First Root UG in Germany.

2401:f9c0:1111::/48 is being used for home use

I also enabled IPv6 at home by routing IPv6 traffic over an OpenVPN tunnel and doing BGP/announce at Singapore on a $3.5/month Vultr VPS. The only remaining thing is setting up reverse DNS for both.

WordPress 5.0

WordPress 5.0 was released today and I updated to it! The most notable feature was the new Gutenberg editor, which I was using earlier as well. I must say the usability jump has been immense, although I can see why people are holding off switching over. There’s classic editor(same as the older one) which is supported until 2023.

I had contemplated moving to alternate platforms like Ghost or static site generators like Hugo, Jenkyll but it looks to be too big of a move. I don’t like the fact that WordPress and the community is focusing more on dynamic site builders and custom frameworks, rather than focusing on building a better product for blogging.

I’m going to APRICOT 2019!

APRICOT is the technical event for network admins organised by APNIC

I managed to get hold of the early bird tickets for APRICOT 2019, which is the technical event held annually for network administrators by APNIC. It will be held in Daejeon, South Korea in February 2019. I will be there for two weeks. Hopefully I get my Visa cleared quickly. That’s the only thing that the whole plan is contingent on.

Thanks for reading and hope to meet you there 😀

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