Restoring Proxmox containers to Ubuntu with LXD

This blog article is not about a production environment, but about my home network. I am (or I should now say was) running a Proxmox node on an old Dell Optiplex 7010 SFF. This home server is hosting several containers and VMs. Such as a media server, some webapps, a couple of DNS servers, etc. Nothing mission critical, but they are services that I use daily.

I was not prepared to migrate them all in a weekend when my home server died one night at 1am, because of a power supply failure…

First steps with NetBox Python API

I often browse the NetBox github repo looking for next features and whatnot, just because I’m naturally interested about this project. And I found myself reading this discussion post.

Basically, this person is storing dates in a field in the device object, and would like to be notified when we’re approaching this deadline. You never know when you’ll need that support contract, but usually it’s just after you’ve let it expired…

I’d never used the NetBox API until now, it was then a great excuse to start poking around it.

How to query your SQL databases from powershell

A quick and easy way !

You need to read, insert or update rows in a database, and it has to be done in Powershell ? I have encountered this need too recently. And I was scratching my head to produce a clean and simple script.

I found the perfect solution, a Powershell module that offers an abstraction to directly query your databases : SimplySql.

Exporting Jira issues to iTop ITSM

The goal

What if you have a backlog / history of hundreds or thousands of issues stored in your Jira server (Cloud SaaS or on-prem) and you’d like to export them ? You don’t have a lot of choices by default : Word or PDF export, or a CSV.

Only the CSV can easily be processed with code, and even then you don’t have access to comments that were added in the issues, nor attachments (images, text files, pcap, etc…).

That was my dilemma, I needed to export our 700+ issues from a SaaS Atlassian Jira instance to import them back to a new on-prem ITSM : iTop.

Thank you Python and REST APIs !

Use MS Graph APIs with Ansible

What was the use-case ?

I had this need at work to query some data from Azure/Microsoft365 and pass it to another internal department to be used in some kind of billing scenario.

There are many ways to get data from the Cloud (with a capital C) in general. You can of course use the web interface for ponctual stuff… But who wants to login to a web portal, find the right menu and copy/paste the wanted information ? Not me for sure !

When you really put your work in production, developing some kind of automation is king.

For whatever reason, Ansible might be the right choice for you, as it was for me. So follow along :)