https://avinashgupta.in/ Notes and incident postmortems by Avinash Gupta. en https://avinashgupta.in/notes/what-im-learning-devopshttps://avinashgupta.in/notes/what-im-learning-devopsThu, 01 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTA learning log. I run production apps on one VM with Docker, PM2 and Nginx. Here is what I am learning next, why, and the plan. https://avinashgupta.in/notes/making-this-portfolio-not-look-ai-generatedhttps://avinashgupta.in/notes/making-this-portfolio-not-look-ai-generatedThu, 01 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTA reel about Claude Code design skills started this site. How it went from a black page that looked like a LinkedIn profile to a paper page with a terminal on it. https://avinashgupta.in/notes/building-my-own-mini-vercelhttps://avinashgupta.in/notes/building-my-own-mini-vercelThu, 01 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMTI deploy many apps by hand, so I built a small platform that does it from a GitHub repo. How it works, what is hard about it, and where it stands. https://avinashgupta.in/incidents/INC-004https://avinashgupta.in/incidents/INC-004Fri, 14 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTI assumed the backend host was the problem, then a free-tier cold start. Both were wrong. The frontend actually lived on Cloudflare Pages, and a detach/reattach of the custom domain had left it stuck and deleted its DNS record. https://avinashgupta.in/notes/reaching-a-server-behind-a-campus-firewallhttps://avinashgupta.in/notes/reaching-a-server-behind-a-campus-firewallSat, 01 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTA command that hung instead of failing, a test that showed the campus firewall was reading the TLS handshake, and what I learned about diagnosing network problems layer by layer. https://avinashgupta.in/notes/our-portal-looked-ai-generatedhttps://avinashgupta.in/notes/our-portal-looked-ai-generatedSat, 01 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTThe Intern Portal is React with Ant Design and Geist. Users said it looked AI-generated. What gave it away, and the approach I took to the audit. https://avinashgupta.in/incidents/INC-002https://avinashgupta.in/incidents/INC-002Fri, 10 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTWith my co-LSC from the technical team, I designed Ghost OA: a temporary 'conductor' that runs one shared OA and then distributes the results back to each real role. We shipped the backend the same night and ran it through manual API calls, then built a proper UI six days later so coordinators could run it themselves. https://avinashgupta.in/incidents/INC-006https://avinashgupta.in/incidents/INC-006Wed, 01 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTWhile recovering from INC-001, I checked who actually controlled the account. My own login had Administrator access, but ownership, billing and OTPs were tied to someone else's email. I worked out what I could change, and how to remove the recurring charge. https://avinashgupta.in/incidents/INC-001https://avinashgupta.in/incidents/INC-001Wed, 10 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTWhile removing an old project, a pasted command lost its line breaks and turned into rm -rf on my entire home directory. I recovered SSH access by rescuing the boot volume through a second instance, rebuilt every service, and hardened the server so a single typo can't do this again. https://avinashgupta.in/incidents/INC-005https://avinashgupta.in/incidents/INC-005Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTThe website records came across but MX, SPF and DKIM didn't. I traced it record by record until every mail check passed. https://avinashgupta.in/notes/placement-shortlist-automationhttps://avinashgupta.in/notes/placement-shortlist-automationFri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTA design I proposed for turning a shortlist spreadsheet into emails and a group chat, and why I would not use an automated WhatsApp number. https://avinashgupta.in/notes/mongodb-7-upgrade-and-free-backupshttps://avinashgupta.in/notes/mongodb-7-upgrade-and-free-backupsFri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTCompass warned that MongoDB 6.0 was end of life. How I upgraded to 7.0 on Ubuntu 22.04 ARM, and the daily Google Drive backup that came out of it. https://avinashgupta.in/incidents/INC-003https://avinashgupta.in/incidents/INC-003Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMTThe server reached the internet through the campus captive portal (agnigarh), the same login page students use. A shell script logged it in again and again, because each session lasted about 40 seconds. Firewall policies kept changing, and whenever the loop broke, everything went down. The real fix wasn't code: emails, repeated visits to the network office and paperwork got the server direct internet access, and then the ports our portals needed.