Guillaume – Guillaume's Blog

Monitoring set-up – How-to

Today we are on for a combination of Telegraf, InfluxDB and Grafana, and I want to get this to work because I am in preparation for a small IoT project of mine, and for simplicity sake I do not want to fiddle with the Raspberry,APIs and some MQTT set-up…I need to go step by step and I simply need an agent that would scrape my local machine statistics and send them on a dashboard. The part I am not sure of is the software piece in the middle between my source and my dashboard, namely here my time series database… And that’s how I came across these 3 applications. Let’s see… let’s get started.

Some Cloud Security best practices

With cyber security continuously hitting the headlines I though I could share some of what I believe is to know when working in the cloud as an absolute minimum and for simple access, you will understand what I mean later, and also share what I learned fiddling with Cloud systems all day long. I shall divide the matter into two categories: the Cloud itself & the VMs.

Temp, Pi Pico, MQTT & Grafana

Here is some holiday fun with the Pi Pico, I decided to hook up to it some sensor to it in order to monitor the children bedroom temperature, and thought it is a good occasion to mess around with MQTT and dashboards.

I pulled my electronics box and had to dig a little in some components and Pi documentation to make sure I’ve got the correct resistors…ah! I didn’t want to fry anymore of these microcontroller boards. After that put together some basic Python code to connect to my LAN, imported the correct sensor libraries, read from the GPIO and pushed out the messages to my MQTT broker on Ubuntu…

My homework on the AI hype

I invested a bit of time to understand the different type of AI models available, mostly LLM or MLLM, and used Ollama to run these, also got RAG powering them and built an Agent after that. Absolutely loved it!

Operators on Kubernetes

Kubernetes seem so prominent these days and with them a term I could hear often: “Operator”. Having no clue I decided to investigate it and after a few questions dropped on my favorite A.I. I could still not wrap my head around it.

Took the matter in my own hands and built my own Kubernetes cluster using Oracle OKE, deployed it with the “quick deploy” option that does for you the networking and some extra ground work which I admit is convenient, but after all, my research is about operators and not cloud infrastructure.

KVM, virtual bridge and APIs

Been exploring KVM on Debian12 recently on my lab machines and I wanted to run a few API tests also, and so to get it to work I had to have my VMs on the same subnet as my physical machines first which is a setup I never did before.

Kubernetes

I had exposure to Kubernetes and it seems to be an important when we talk about distributed systems and high performance computing, and I wanted to get a hand on this as I was not familiar with it. In terms of virtualisation technologies I did not go further than virtual machines so this is frankly new for me.

Pass your CCNA first try

I recently passed my CCNA, this was the most challenging certification so far and it did require more work compared to other courses I have followed until now.

Networking

Another area coming up in a recurrent fashion is networking, and regardless of the technology you are working on there will be a continuous requirement of knowledge on this area. I had to go through most of the basics with Virtual cloud networks, subnetworks, IP addresses, firewalls, Access Control Lists, and so forth. These cloud platform certifications do a good job at getting you up to speed and cutting through what matters the most.

All over again

It has been four months since I have started my technical journey once again and I have decided to focus my attention on the key cloud platforms of today. My first remark is that regardless of the tech I play with or certification I follow, I would have to go through some UNIX commands and CLI and to try to figure out some obnoxious file ownership, firewall or environment variables – and without knowing about these there are no chance you will do anything.