Costin Stefan

Welcome to my blog. You will find useful random stuff, mostly IT infra-related.

Microsoft announced Think Deeper, free access to GPT o1 model

So recently Microsoft announced they’re offering ChatGPT o1 model free to their Copilot program. So I’ve decided to give it a go and see how it goes. First I’ve connected to https://copilot.microsoft.com with both a personal account and a work account. I’ve tested the announcement of this by asking it directly: What we can see quickly is that my company-linked account has to update to latest Copilot because it still uses GPT4 as a LLM. While the official Copilot uses the latest model. Even though it doesn’t respond directly like its previous model. ...

January 31, 2025 · 3 min · 431 words · costin

How to analyze and fix a pod scheduling issue due to Insufficient Memory on Kubernetes or Openshift.

So it may happen that you have a Kubernetes or Openshift deployment and a pod does not want to start and remains in Pending state. First, let’s check the events that are causing this: [root@server ~]# k get events -n <namespace> LAST SEEN TYPE REASON OBJECT MESSAGE 31m Warning FailedScheduling <namespace>/<pod_name> 0/13 nodes are available: 10 Insufficient memory, 3 node(s) had taint {node-role.kubernetes.io/master: }, that the pod didn't tolerate, 4 Insufficient cpu. As we can see, the reason is FailedScheduling and the message complains about insufficient memory and insufficient cpu. ...

January 9, 2025 · 6 min · 1175 words · costin

How to get audio notification from CLI when server or service is reachable

If you’re working on fixing an issue on a server and want to be notified as soon as this is reachable, you can run an audio alert. Below I have a list of variations of the Bell Character. Windows / PowerShell: while ($true) {if (Test-Connection -quiet 1.1.1.1) { [console]::beep() }} Windows / cmd: for /L %n in () do @ping -n 1 1.1.1.1 && echo ^G WSL2 / Bash: while true; do sudo ping -q 1.1.1.1 -w1 >/dev/null && tput bel; sleep 5; done on WSL ping needs eleventation so sudo is mandatory. ...

December 31, 2024 · 2 min · 279 words · costin

How to configure Roundcubemail for iCloud custom domain email address

So I’ve tried to configure a self-hosted Roundcube container and set up an iCloud account with a custom domain address. Something like what this guy wanted to do a couple of years ago. Unfortunately, there was no tutorial available on the internet, so here I am creating one for you :) I’m using docker compose in my local selfhosted lab, so the first thing to do was to get the correct docker-compose.yml file. For this I went to the official one and I took the vars from the official docker image. However, playing with variables was a pain. The official documentation from Apple offered the correct IMAP and SMTP servers and ports. However, later I found out that for a 3rd party application you need to create a special password: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102654 ...

October 25, 2024 · 2 min · 314 words · costin

How to automate testing webapps

For today’s post I will walk you through the process of setting up a web-app testing environment automatically using ansible. I will split this into 2 parts. First part will focus on creating the automation needed to deploy the containers on proxmox. Second part is about creating the tester tool solution. Assumption: you already have a proxmox server in place. your ansible controller has passwordless ssh access enabled to the proxmox server. you know what ansible is and how to use it. ok, so the first step is to install ansible. I recommend doing this in a virtual environment: ...

June 4, 2024 · 4 min · 647 words · costin