Blog Entries

05. 08. 2025 Alessandro Valentini DevOps, Kubernetes

Use S3 Storage with OpenShift Data Foundation

Recently, we needed to upload build artifacts to allow developers to visualize Playwright test recordings. Initially, we used a simple PVC and an NGINX server with basic authentication, but this approach has a major drawback: it doesn’t allow uploads from different namespaces. As a result, we had to choose whether to deploy this service and…

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14. 06. 2025 Alessandro Valentini DevOps, NetEye

How to Add a Drive Selector to an ISO Image

Our old ISO used the first drive (sda) as the only option when installing the system. Sometimes we were asked to install NetEye on a different drive, so as a workaround we suggested properly sorting RAID arrays in the controller, in order to put the installation drive first on the list. Even if suboptimal, this…

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04. 03. 2025 Alessandro Valentini Automation, DevOps, Service Management

Group-aware Reboot with Ansible

Use Case During NetEye Cloud updates we typically have to handle 25+ nodes, updating both OS and Firmware and subsequently rebooting all servers, all without causing downtime. We can of course reboot one node a time, but this would be really time-consuming. The main constraints on reboot are PCS nodes and Elastic layers. In particular…

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31. 12. 2024 Alessandro Valentini DevOps

GitOps: Pull-based vs Push-based Approaches

When approaching a GitOps workflow you’ll soon have to choose between push- and pull-based approaches. In this blog post I’ll explain the high-level differences of each approach with pros and cons. What is GitOps? GitOps stands for Git Operation: in this workflow all the infrastructure configurations are stored in a Git repository, which represents the…

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16. 12. 2024 Alessandro Valentini Development, DevOps

NetEye and RHUI Repositories

Recently we had to provision a couple of NetEye machines on Azure for production purposes. Our procedure essentially creates a RedHat 8.10 VM starting with an official RedHat image, and adds the NetEye repositories to install the required software. This procedure is what we usually follow to create training environments, but these machines are usually…

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26. 07. 2024 Alessandro Valentini DevOps

Bonding Configuration While Adding an OpenShift Node

When you prepare a machine for production, you usually want to use a redundant network interface in order to be resilient to possible network outages. When we created our OpenShift cluster this wasn’t possible during the installation procedure, at least not using the UPI procedure. We recently added a new node and discovered this new…

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14. 06. 2024 Alessandro Valentini DevOps, NetEye

Automating the Full NetEye Release Procedure

One of the first issues we added more than 2 years ago to our DevOps backlog was automating the infrastructure preparation and release of NetEye, but we postponed it for a long time because it was too big to do. A bit of background Every 2 months we release a new NetEye version: this basically…

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24. 05. 2024 Alessandro Valentini DevOps

OpenShift: How to Check and Reset Ceph Storage in Warning State

Every so often it may happen (in particular after a cluster update or hardware issues) that you see your storage in a warning state on OpenShift. The first thing to do is to check what’s wrong with your cluster: sometimes you may have a real issue, in other cases it may just be a temporary…

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01. 12. 2023 Alessandro Valentini Development, DevOps

How to Install Matomo on OpenShift

Recently we felt the need to collect anonymous metrics about how our users are visiting our websites. After some investigation, the development team proposed using Matomo: a free and open source software project which collects usage metrics while guaranteeing 100% privacy alongside the chance to be self-hosted. We decided to install it on OpenShift, since…

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28. 11. 2023 Alessandro Valentini DevOps

My OpenShift Journey #7: Enabling Persistent Monitoring

Some days after installing an OpenShift cluster you may notice a warning related to insights: the system is complaining because metrics are not stored in a persistent way and a restart of the container may cause the loss of metrics. In OpenShift it is possible to configure several custom metrics. In this post I will…

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10. 08. 2023 Alessandro Valentini Bug Fixes, NetEye

Bug Fixes for NetEye 4.31 and 4.30

We fixed a bug in NetEye Userguide clarifying the procedure to setup custom certificate on a NetEye Mirror in Change NGINX Certificates section both in NetEye 4.30 and 4.31.

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18. 07. 2023 Alessandro Valentini DevOps

My OpenShift Journey #6: Pipelining Part II

In my previous blog-post I wrote an introduction to pipelining in OpenShift. This blog post is a follow-up to explain how to trigger a pipeline automatically. Tekton triggers are quite complex and need some explanation in order to be understood. To trigger a pipeline you need several components. In the graph below you can see…

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17. 07. 2023 Alessandro Valentini DevOps

My OpenShift Journey #6: Pipelining Part I

It’s been a while since my last blog post about our OpenShift journey since as a devops team, we’ve been focusing on other activities for a while. Today I’d like to talk a bit about how to use OpenShift for CI purposes. As described in our productive use case, we implemented several pipelines to build…

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06. 04. 2023 Alessandro Valentini DevOps, NetEye

A Productive OpenShift Use Case: NetEye User Guide

In December 2022 we decided to completely restructure the code of our User Guide. Previously, each project contained its own documentation, but this led to very difficult and time-consuming development having the code scattered across more than 40 repositories. Furthermore our contributors are not necessarily NetEye developers, or even developers at all. Setting up a…

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20. 12. 2022 Alessandro Valentini DevOps

One Year as a DevOps Engineer

The Beginning When I started my new role as a DevOps Engineer at the beginning of 2022, we had little experience in DevOps as a team. We tried several times to implement automation in order to simplify maintenance and reduce the amount of overall effort we invested in routine activities. However, since DevOps engineers are…

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