So you have tried all the tools and libraries, but extracting data from giant Excel sheets is still too slow ? On the menu for this blog post we have: Quick dive into the structure of XLSX files The lxml library and the XSLT transformation How to use XSLT to parse

This morning when I woke up, it was to the sound of my monitoring system notifications. We have a pretty simple setup: web servers connect to the vpn server vpn server connects to the internal servers web and vpn are hosted for our customer by a cloud provider internal servers

Recently we wanted to deploy a bunch of Celery workers and connect them using a Redis backend for tasks scheduling and result storage. Since the workers and Redis would be internet-facing, we wanted to make sure it was not leaking any data, so we made a few tests. Securing the

This is a presentation that I gave at the first edition of FOSDEMx, at the University of Brussels on May, 3rd 2018. The intent is to scratch the surface of what it takes to do CPU performance optimization in Python, and give students a few first tools to get started.

So, you want to be the guy who installs an NSX Edge for the first time and does not spend a whole week (or more) to do it? Here are some tips to make the installation easier. Version Note: for ESXi 6.0 and higher Getting started You’ll have

Docker everywhere At Adimian, Docker really changed the way we deploy applications. We've been playing with it since the beta, and using it in production since version 1.0. By the end of 2015, we plan to have converted all our deployments using containers, migrating applications to Docker if they

If you've set up a shinken monitor, you'll probably be a bit disappointed that the graph feature is not included, and that setting it up isn't all that easy. Luckily, this guide will show you how to do this, fairly easy. The first thing to know is that you'll be

Introduction Shinken is a monitoring service based on Nagios written in python. The cool stuff here is that it's written in python, but also that you are able to use many, if not all, Nagios plugins. "But Maarten, why is it so great that it's written in python ?"

I'm using a SoYouStart server from OVH for a project where I need to deploy Docker containers. I kept having errors of the like: Error response from daemon: Cannot start container f5fa26a2b00e154dd851cfbf4459d03e996dea7b3fc18d9c51dc5b24bb132e32: fork/exec /var/lib/docker/init/dockerinit-1.0.1: invalid argument After checking on Docker's GitHub, it seems

Today I wanted to reinstall an openldap server for which I didn't have credentials, but where I had root access. Some files were left after I removed the package, so I tried to remove them manually, but doing so I interfered with the apt cleanup process and I ended up

Closure tables There is a lot of techniques to store and manipulate tree-like structures in a relational database. Among them, the one that is noteworthy for his simplicity and performance is the Closure Table approach. The basic idea is to store all the ancestor-descendant relation and their depths. So from

Since November 2012 and the release 1.9, the Paramiko API allows to use a proxy command when the ssh connection is created. For example: sock = paramiko.ProxyCommand(proxy_command) client.connect( hostname=host, port=port, username=username, password=password, sock=sock, ) where proxy_command contains a string with a

If for some reason you want to perform basic actions on your LDAP server, be it for troubleshooting or integration with and app you're writing, and you don't really know what data to expect. Then I've got some code for you that you can execute quick and easy in a

As part of a project at a customer, we're setting up a bunch of servers running Ubuntu 14.04, and I wanted the machines to keep themselves up to date. There is a not well-known package that handles that pretty well: unattended-upgrades. It works well so far, but I wanted

The fun part about working in IT is that you're often forced to work with - and make things work based on - technologies you are unfamiliar with. So, at one point in my (infant) career, I was asked to set up an LDAP server that supported user, groups, and