I’m a Linux administrator who likes going past the “it works” layer — digging into how things actually work under the hood. Whether it’s understanding how the /proc filesystem represents running processes, how job schedulers like IBM LSF dispatch work across clusters, or how systems programming concepts show up in everyday tools — that’s where I get curious.
I write about Linux internals, HPC infrastructure, and the kind of automation that makes systems actually usable. Most of my posts are notes from building things, breaking things, and figuring out why things broke.
Target: Mobiflix Android App (com.mobiflix.mobile) Date: July 18, 2026
Researcher: thamjeed
Environment: Fedora WSL2 on Windows 11, Physical Android device (Xiaomi POCO, Android 13, arm64)
Scope: Educational — understanding mobile app architecture, API design, native library obfuscation, and dynamic instrumentation techniques.
Overview This document is a complete, step-by-step writeup of reverse engineering an Android streaming application from scratch. The goal was to understand:
Where the app fetches its content from How the app protects its API endpoints What encryption scheme is used to hide configuration How certificate pinning is implemented and bypassed The full API surface area of the backend The process combined static analysis (decompiling the APK and reading Java/smali code) with dynamic analysis (Frida instrumentation, mitmproxy traffic interception).
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#android, #reverse-engineering, #apk
Building a CloudStream Plugin from Scratch - How I Made Thamflix
Not my usual topic, but a fun project I wanted to share.
CloudStream is an open-source Android app for streaming movies and TV shows. What makes it powerful is its plugin system - anyone can write a provider that scrapes or queries any source and plug it directly into the app. This post walks through exactly how I built Thamflix, a plugin that uses the TMDB API for metadata and Vidlink for streaming.
Setting up the Community Edition of IBM LSF (Load Sharing Facility)
Introduction I wanted to understand how LSF actually works, not just at a surface “submit job, job runs” level, but the real mechanics. Most places that use LSF don’t document it well, and when they do, it’s written assuming you already run a production cluster.
So I decided to build a small LSF Community Edition cluster at home and treat it like an EDA-style environment: master node, execution nodes, login-style submission, interactive jobs, X11, the whole thing.
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#ibm-lsf, #linux, #cluster, #hpc
Setting Up Samba as an Active Directory Domain Controller on Linux
In this guide, we walk through the process of setting up a Samba Active Directory Domain Controller. The goal is to create a fully functional AD environment with the ability to join Windows and Linux clients to the domain.
This setup mirrors how Microsoft Active Directory works, but fully powered by open‑source software.
We’ll be using Fedora Linux to configure Samba AD, but you can use any Linux
Preparing the Domain Controller System We begin by configuring Fedora 43 to act as a domain controller. The hostname must reflect the fully qualified domain name of the AD server.
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#samba, #active-directory, #linux
SLURM as a Compilation Farm
Note: 📢 This document is based on my understanding of SLURM and is in no way a detailed guide covering every single topic. Take this as a practical guide from a noob’s perspective diving into it.
Introduction: This guide is designed to help you effectively use the SLURM scheduler on Rocky Linux 9.5 server. The Server allows you to run computational jobs using both interactive and non-interactive modes. The goal here is to make a compilation farm, although this guide specifically focuses on compiling the Linux kernel, one should note that this may also be used to compile any other tool given that the prerequisites and dependencies are known.