Guillaume's Blog – Opinions are my own

Setup your own VPN server

VPN is a hot topic with remarks ongoing about our privacy. Luckily we have several tools at our disposal to respond with, and VPN is one of them, but only one amongst many. It will make your traffic appear from a different location and IP, which is a huge plus. It does it by encrypting entirely your internet data between your physical location and the physical location of your VPN server, and it is the core of the issue for some.

You can visualise it as a ‘tunnel’ – you are visible at the entrance or when you exit but not in between.

Update May 26

It has been extremely busy lately and I have not really been able to work on side projects or to move forward much on my learning.

Quick update, this is where I am at now:

Day 56 of the 100 Days of Python course
Finalising a Linux Admin course (another one!)
Going though a BASH command line hands-on with this video

Cross identify cloud storage with instance storage

The other day, as I was clearing out storage on a VM and consolidating logical volumes into a lesser number of physical volumes, I ran into an issue where there was no way for me to identify to which cloud block storage my freshly freed /dev/sdc disk did correspond to… So how was I supposed to know which block to delete in the console and save money?

Access OCI object storage from Windows clients

I have a scenario where I want to equip Windows machines with a local access to OCI Object storage files. We have to go about it in two steps, first we install s3fs, and second we install and configure samba. Our VM need to be able to access OCI resources and I recommend to use resource principals.

Build a Dropbox like

This time we won’t be using any cloud components as I want to show you the old way to do it, sort of speak, using a Linux VM. This example focuses on the following functionality: upload, delete and list, and to harden it to the extend I can. There are several ways to do it, but mine is as follows:

Get my home bins collection date automatically by sms

Every two weeks or so my bins get collected from home and there would be no issues if the schedule remained predictable… but it is not, and missing a collection date brings me an additional two weeks wait for refuse collection, and inevitably results in annoying trips to the dump to offload excess. I found myself checking the website way too often and I had to find a solution about it. Let’s have a look on how I could take advantage of the serverless OCI functions to repeatedly scrap the webpage to then send myself a daily SMS reminder. Here is what I propose:

Day 25 of 100 days of Python

I am at the moment going through a course called 100 Days of Code from Angela Yu and I love it! It is a really good refresher and I feel it was so much needed for me to play around with the most famous libraries of today on the topic of cloud platforms, data manipulation, AI frameworks, automation and whatnot. Vibe coding does not really cut it for me.

Analysing VM logs at scale with AI-big data toolset like AIDP

One way to get your logs back into OCI is to use the out of the box Custom Log Monitoring agent. The other way is to install Fluentd manually, and that is what we are going to do so we can keep control of the output my way and get it onto Object Storage for further analysis.

What software allows companies to react to inputs in real-time?

To illustrate how this works let’s take a look at two pervasive technologies: Spark and Kafka. These two have become hugely popular because of the need for real time data processing – for instance self driving cars, taxi sharing apps, fraud detection or any application where the user needs to be warned immediately. Let’s build a toy real time weather recording and alerting app and experiment together.

My VMWare homework

I have been playing with VMWare recently and had to learn about it due to its ubiquitous presence on the enterprise market. I feel I now understand its popularity amongst the user base – leaving aside the Broadcom acquisition drama! – and wanted to share my feelings about it after using it in my home lab.