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Who... A self made interview, so you don't have to ask for it

CV

So.​

ooooo, who did this sorry excuse of a website?

Pierre-Jean Gineste Linkedin

... I mean what ARE you, you must be a human, you pass the damned captchas all the time !​

Wooohooo! Human ! Haem :

I can be any of those : IT Cobbler, generic sysadmin, jack of many trades, master of... eh... few? none? (vsauce-intro.mp3) Yet, what is a master?

I have a background in programming, but I have yet to rekindle my love of it, maybe this wesite will help. So, for the past while, I have been learning and using my skills in systems to diagnose issues, hack solutions, and make stuff that didn't work actually do.

Hopelessly trying to optimize stuff that's going to disapear in two minutes (or two years) Building boring solutions for broke IT people. Less is better, simple is better than complex (It's the name of another blog that I really like)

Ok, so what are you doing in your life?​

Professionally​

I'm an Operative in a company selling a disaster recovery service as an MSP.

First of all, I've been looking for our customer's backups, their cloud recovery environment and it's readiness to respond to either an incident or a disaster. AKA : I monitor the solution. This also means that backups need to be up to date and functionnal (AKA. regularly tested), that the recovery process in functionnal from both a human and a technical perspective. The monitoring of the solution covers many aspects of the IT system's lifecycle : from making sure the information we have about our customers systems is up to date in order to avoid restoring bullish data at the wrong place, to keeping to documentation up to date so Teams, that, if a customer needs to refer . to it, he can have a decently high level of confidence in it.

Personnaly​

I print stuff in 3D, I also try to design the things I print (then fail and hence creating "hairy voodoo things") when it all goes wrong. I have my homelab on which I experiment all sorts of technologies (#remindMe create a page detailing the homelab) I drown myself in electronic music

Which technologies have you dealt with​

Yeah... I don't see any other way than doing a list... way too much stuff to discuss

Programming​

Discovered At school​

  • ADA (super cool, wish every language had the compilers details, but it's niche)
  • JAVA (yeah uh, the JVM is a big turnoff now)
  • C (Nope, not willing to work on this anymore)
  • C++ (NopeNopeNope...)
  • Bash (Enhanced quite a bit of seedbox scripts written in bash )

Discovered and used at work​

  • JS (not my cup of tea at all but eh, this website has some :) )
  • Python -> link to a page where I explain what I did in python?
  • Powershell (Yup, it's a language, it's weird but does the job ! )

System​

Hypervisors​

  • VMware ESX AKA VSphere)
  • XCP-ng (even recompiled their Orchestra product to get rid of the limitations)
  • Proxmox (my homelab's current Hypervisor)

OSes​

  • Windows Server From the now antique 2003 to 2022, (I discovered IT on Windows Millenium)

  • Linux Ubuntu user since 12.04 (probably till have the CDs somewhere ;) time sure flies) Debian for every servers ever I own, have a look at the DietPi Project, you won't regret it (yes they have x86 builds). RedHat derivatives : My viewpoint on those : except Fedora thet a chef's kiss of usability, burn it all, especially the EPEL mess and since the "CentOS stream" BS, I also used CentOS 5 at my previous work with truly stellar uptimes, scariest shit to update EVER... and no MS Exchange doesn't count.

Programs​

Monitoring​
  • Centreon : enhancing the fundamentally flawed vision that is Nagios by making the dashboard way better and interactive -- Being an industry standard at a point in time doesn't make you good, today better observability plaforms/solutions exist like the combo Prometheus/Grafana, especially since their agents have reached public availability. Yeet out SNMP, had to deal with too much undocumented bullshit on it.
  • Zabbix : I tried, for days to understand how it works, and still don't understand how their discovery feature works, and why nothing is simple!
  • Prometheus/Grafana : Barely started to use it, but it's already a pleasure to work with. Sure everything needs to be configured by hand, but their agents are godsend to push data from what you wish to monitor to the monitoring plaform.
Version Control​
  • Gitlab : Used on-premises as well as the cloud version, the CI is extremely powerful.
  • Github : The main hub for discovering interesting opensource projects, my first VCS home.
  • Git from the CLI : aaaaah, the good ol "git push" or "git fetch" from the command line.
Collaboration​
  • MS Teams : It's really nice, but heavy as hell on many people, sometimes including the admins.
  • Slack : used a bit, migrated to the afforementionned Teams.
  • Nextcloud : Used to share data with customers and internally.

Security​

Programs​

  • Bitwarden : Best password manager hands down, cloud version personnally, VaultWarden being the selfhosted fork we deployed at work.

Appliances​

  • Fortigate : Network security appliance with a really nice UI since the 7.0 version, decent workflows and really usable. The only downside are the insane licence costs for the full protection suite including logging, threat detection and analysis...
  • PFSense / OpnSense : Deployed at scale both OSes for the DR test and emergency connectivity solutions
Office​
  • The MS Office suite, so Teams, Excel, Powerpoint and Word in order of usage.
  • Libre-Office in

Clouds​

  • AWS : ran a bit of stuff there until I got a bill... ran away after that, now I'm careful with resources usage.
  • Azure : Ran a distributed peer to peer content delivery network with servers manually deployed there, it's been a while.
  • Scaleway : Currently use their Object storage for backups and a few of their instances.
  • OVH Cloud : Using a bit of their object storage as well as well as cold storage.
  • Orange Flexible Engine / Huawei Cloud : Main cloud used at work, it's based on OpensStack but heavily customised to feel like AWS. I used compute, storage (block and object), sdks, networking, and most of the standard functions.

(Y) That's... a lot.

Yup, and I'm not done learning new things.