Blog Entries

24. 12. 2023 Damiano Chini Development, DevOps, NetEye

How We Want to Avoid Breaking the NetEye User Guide (Again)

A few months ago while navigating through our NetEye User Guide we noticed that it had a small bug that caused some words in the right-side menu to be slightly truncated in the particular case where that menu contained some monospace characters. Well, since this was quite annoying, we fixed it on the fly with…

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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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30. 10. 2023 Lorenzo Candeago DevOps

How to Fix OpenShift Console not Showing the Characters in Firefox

Recently when opening a console in the web-ui of OpenShift in Firefox, I saw the following: This doesn’t happen when opening the console using Chromium. In the Firefox debugger, we can see that we have the following error: The error is due to a strict Firefox privacy setting that prevents characters from being loaded. To…

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12. 09. 2023 Lorenzo Candeago DevOps

How to Convert and Add a .pfx cert to Pulp 3 Operator

On our OpenShift cluster we use pulp3 as the repository manager. One recent task we had to do was to add a certificate before we could expose the repository over TLS. Our IT department provided us with the certificate in .pfx format. Following this guide for converting the certificate to a format usable by OpenShift,…

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25. 08. 2023 Lorenzo Candeago DevOps

Debug and Workarounds for a Stuck Update on OpenShift 4.13.6

Today we wanted to update our OpenShift cluster, and after a while we came up against the following error: Not good… Let’s start by checking the clusterversion to investigate if we can find any errors: By analyzing the logs further we found the following error: it seems like the openshift-etcd-operator is not able to deploy…

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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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10. 10. 2022 Lorenzo Candeago DevOps

My OpenShift Journey #5: Run Unprivileged Containers with systemd in OpenShift: Part 2 – Testing

In my previous blog post, we modified the boot parameters to enable cgroups v2 and the user namespace in CRI-O. In this second part I’ll show you how to run a sample container with systemd and check that the modifications we made actually worked. Setting up a Test Docker To test the new config, let’s…

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06. 10. 2022 Lorenzo Candeago DevOps

My OpenShift Journey #4: Run Unprivileged Containers with systemd in OpenShift: Part 1 – Deployment

For our ongoing transition from Jenkins to OpenShift, we’re currently working on porting our testing infrastructure to OpenShift. Our tests involve installing and running our product, NetEye, in a container. The installation requires a working systemd environment inside the container, and systemd needs to run with PID 1 and as root user (UID 0). Until…

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05. 10. 2022 Alessandro Valentini DevOps

My OpenShift Journey #3: Active Directory Integration and User Management

In our migration journey from multiple VMs to OpenShift, one mandatory step is the integration with our company’s Active Directory. This is the default IdP for our services like Jenkins, NetEye, etc., and we want to centralize authentication and permissions as much as possible. Integration with OpenShift is less straightforward than it is with other…

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14. 07. 2022 Alessandro Valentini DevOps

My OpenShift Journey #2: Nginx Load Balancing and SSL Termination

In a previous blog post I described how we installed our first OpenShift cluster and how we used HA Proxy as a load balancer. Our cluster is meant to host both internal services (like CI and docker registry) and public services, and we thus have to expose them on multiple domains with valid SSL certificates….

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07. 07. 2022 Alessandro Valentini DevOps

My OpenShift Journey #1: Getting Started with a Cluster

Within our Research and Development team we maintain a set of both physical and virtual machines for many purposes: internal repository mirrors, CI/CD, testing, internal docker registry, etc… Maintaining them is demanding, especially considering that our infrastructure has grown over the years and was often configured by different colleagues using different software and tools. And…

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