Recent content on Le Baron de Charlus
Something changed in the last couple of months if not years now. Open Slack, open a Notion page, scroll LinkedIn for thirty seconds, and there it is: a long dash sitting in the middle of a sentence, doing a job a comma or a period used to do just fine. It shows up so often now that it isn’t really a stylistic choice anymore, it’s a tell. A character almost nobody typed The mark is the em dash.…
L’essor des formations initiales et en alternance dans le secteur du numérique a entraîné la multiplication des établissements privés proposant le BTS SIO (Services Informatiques aux Organisations), décliné en options SLAM (développement) et SISR (réseaux), ainsi que le nouveau cursus CIEL (cybersécurité, informatique et réseaux). Pourtant, derrière les promesses d’employabilité et malgré des…
The boom in initial training and work-study programs within the digital sector has led to a proliferation of private institutions offering the BTS SIO ( Services Informatiques aux Organisations ), split into the SLAM (software development) and SISR (networks and infrastructure) options, as well as the new CIEL curriculum ( Cybersécurité, Informatique et Réseaux ). Behind the promises of high…
Context It took me a long time to finally sit down and write this article. I’ve always been passionate about technology. It’s in my DNA. For over 10 years, I’ve worked in IT engineering, taking on roles such as Full-Stack Developer, System Administrator, DevOps Engineer, and Site Reliability Engineer. My path has been unconventional: entirely self-taught, climbing the ranks one step at a time. I…
More than a decade ago, I started experiencing pain in my right hand , without realizing at first that it had anything to do with my keyboard. It wasn’t until the pain eased whenever I took a break from typing that I identified the culprit: Carpal Tunnel Syndrome . The pain was especially sharp when pressing the backspace key , an awkward reach that strained my wrist. Source As a software and…
In the previous article, we installed and ran our Backstage instance with Devbox. Now let’s dig into the configuration and set up GitHub authentication so we can actually log in to our app! We left off with a working local Backstage application, accessible at http://localhost:3000 . Missed Part 1? Related: A Journey with Backstage: One Platform to Rule Them All (Part 1) Let’s reuse the Devbox…
Introduction Our team recently set out to integrate Backstage, and this is the first in a series of articles documenting that experience. This piece covers the installation process and basic setup, but first, let’s look at why we chose Backstage in the first place. Why Backstage? Backstage is an open platform for building developer portals, originally created by Spotify and now maintained under…
Achieving efficiency and maintaining consistency across development environments are two of the most persistent challenges developers face. My search for tools that streamline the development process while keeping work environments reproducible and manageable led me to Devbox: a command-line utility that changes the way developers create and manage isolated environments, a bit like a Swiss Army…
Why I’ve recently been writing some shell scripts to automate and distribute actions that used to be done manually (I’ll write a post about that later). For now, I’d like to share how I built a 100% shell-based loader library to use in my scripts. I looked around for an existing library and found a few interesting GitHub projects, but none of them felt ready to use as an actual…
Disclaimer: I’m not saying virtualenv methods are bad. The Old way For years, I’ve used Python for a lot of different projects. My setup was simple: use virtualenv and work locally. But this approach came with a few pain points. I’d often forget to source venv/bin/activate , which meant I’d end up running pip install my-package on my global system instead. I also had poor secrets…
Quick post about Zellij , a great tool I’ve been using for a few weeks as a Tmux replacement. I kept missing a way to manage my sessions whenever I started a new shell or terminal , so I built a quick feature to handle it on startup. Dependencies You need sk binary installed and in your $PATH and of course zellij . Installation Add this block at the end of your $SHELLrc file (tested with…
While working at OVHCloud , I developed a feature called BYOI (Bring Your Own Image). Bring Your Own Image technology lets you boot any cloud (or non-cloud) image on bare metal. Not every vendor ships images that are fully agnostic yet (by that I mean ready for both UEFI and legacy boot ), but with a bit of tinkering ( packer ), we can get something functional. This marks a first step towards…
I wanted to shake up my routine a bit while working on my laptop, so I figured automatically changing my wallpaper at random would be a good way to break the monotony. I use awesomeWM (version 4): [f00b@void ~]$ awesome --version awesome v4.3 (Too long) • Compiled against Lua 5.3.5 (running with Lua 5.3) • D-Bus support: ✔ • execinfo support: ✘ • xcb-randr version: 1.6 • LGI version: 0.9.2 So I…
When you create an OVH Public Cloud instance running FreeBSD with a given amount of disk space, say 50G, you’ll find that it isn’t fully applied to your partition. First, let’s look at what we have: # gpart show => 40 10239920 da0 GPT (50G) [CORRUPT] 40 1024 1 freebsd-boot (512K) 1064 984 - free - (492K) 2048 10235904 2 freebsd-zfs (4.9G) 10237952 2008 - free - (1.0M) Notice that…
You may have noticed this already: when you spin up an OVH Public Cloud (PCI) instance running Ubuntu with Vrack enabled, the VM won’t have its private IP at boot time. I’m not a big fan of Ubuntu, but sometimes you don’t get to choose. Anyway, long story short: no private IP, and that’s a shame. (RT) The fix is stupid. Very stupid. Add the following to the…
Now that GitLab offers its own image registry, we can use it directly in our K8s environment. If you missed the announcement (it’s a bit dated by now), check out this article . To add the GitLab private registry to Kubernetes, you first need to create a secret: > kubectl create secret docker-registry regsecret --docker-server=registry.gitlab.xyz --docker-username='' --docker-password=''…
With OVH Public Cloud, you can control your OpenStack instances directly from the Nova client. Working from the command line is much more practical than going through the manager, which, let’s be honest, is often slow. To avoid setting up a working Nova environment every time, I found it more convenient to package everything into a Docker image. That way, the only thing you need installed on…
The hosting world is changing, and so is the way we build applications. We’re turning less and less to dedicated hosting for a single application, and more toward building the infrastructure that will support it. In practice, this means favoring an IaaS layer on top of dedicated “bare metal” for our application overlay, rather than provisioning pure “bare metal” per…
We needed servers at Online, but there was no availability! So they came to ask me if I had some kind of magic solution… A bit of bash , a notify (in this case Slack ), and here we go! Dirty way To get alerted via Slack, you need to create an incoming-webhook , which will generate a link. For an XC 2016 series server: text = 'DISPO : https://www.online.net/fr/serveur-dedie/dedibox-xc' ;…
Adding an extra disk or volume to your OVH Public Cloud instance takes a few manual steps. Here’s how to do it. First, identify your new disk: fdisk -l The output will vary depending on your system ( sd{x} , vd{x} ). Then create a new partition: # parted /dev/{{disk}} mktable gpt mkpart primary ext4 512 100% quit Format it: mkfs -t ext4 -L rootfs /dev/ {{ disk }} 1 Mount it: mount /dev/ {{…
I recently had to migrate containers from a Proxmox 3 host (running OpenVZ) to a Proxmox 4 host (running LXC). The problem was the sheer number of containers to migrate and “convert” to run under LXC, so I needed a way to automate the process as much as possible. Luckily, the migration documentation is very well detailed, so I used it as the basis for a couple of scripts. I split the…
For one specific request, I had to build an automated program that reacts to SFTP user updates. The main technical challenge was that the SFTP protocol has no logging system of its own. I had heard about the pyinotify library , so I started working with it. This post covers the project’s core mechanism ; for more detail, I invite you to read the source code. Technical requirements for the…
Monitoring a database in standalone mode is one thing, but clustering makes it a lot more complex. That’s exactly the case with Galera clustering (MariaDB/MySQL). Zabbix and similar tools gave me simple solutions for single database servers, but I couldn’t find a template I actually liked for monitoring a Galera cluster in production. So a few questions came up: what to monitor, how to…
Notes on code, management & culture, from someone who has spent more than a decade moving through the ranks of IT: developer, SRE, engineering manager, and now director. Writing here under the name of Le Baron de Charlus.
My projects Keel : Managed Jails alternative of Kubernetes for BSD systems, made in Rust. Bring Your Own image : Allows you to boot any cloud (or not) images on a baremetal. Participated on FDD-book : FreeBSD Device Driver Book. apisix-ingress-controller : APISIX Ingress Controller for Kubernetes. backstage-plugins : Backstage plugins for Axis Communications. backstage/community-plugins :…