Town of Chantepie

The motivations of the city of Chantepie

Systems and Networks Administrator at the City of Chantepie Near Rennes, Pierre manages the entire digital service for the 160 agents of the commune. When he talks about his job, Pierre immediately highlights a notable evolution where the management of network outages becomes an increasingly important mission " Our job is no longer just to make servers work […], ensuring continuous access to the internet has also become a primary mission. » In other words, providing high availability is at the heart of its concerns. That is one of the reasons why he called upon the téïcée.

The choice was made on OPNsense

The Town Hall of Chantepie was looking for a firewall solution to replace its firewall, which was no longer maintained by its supplier. Among several proposals, the choice was made téïcée and OPNsense, first for the competitiveness of the offer and then for the values of Open Source “ We chose téïcée because it offered open source and the ‘double firewall’. I also wanted two firewalls. The goal was to make the internet connection more reliable. ». The replacement of the unmaintained firewall was indeed an opportunity to implement high availability, a process that leads to minimizing service interruptions, planned or not, where it is a question of guaranteeing users a quasi-continuous accessibility. As Pierre explains, this measure becomes inherent in the SaaS mode, which consists of offering applications and software hosted on a cloud.

Foresight at the heart of the City Hall's concerns

With the widespread use of this type of service, the Internet has indeed become a quasi-vital element for the functioning of administrations or communities such as the Town hall of Chantepie.
Although the SaaS option has many advantages, such as the “ reduction of internal resources ”, it also has the drawback of aggravating the impact of a network outage. By rendering many business applications inaccessible, service interruption can result in near-complete paralysis of a community. In these circumstances, and as Pierre explains “ an hour of outage quickly becomes critical ».
Concretely, the municipality of Chantepie has two firewalls configured so that one of them ensures continuity of service when its counterpart falls. To this was added the feeding by two fibers of different origins to multiply the sources.

“There is no system outage, no computer outage”

When we talk to him about high availability at the Town Hall of Chantepie the comparison used by Pierre is interesting “lat high availability, it's like insurance, it's there but the idea is not to have to use it ».
It is indeed not easy to decide on the effectiveness of a preventive mechanism, a safety net that has not yet been used. However, the advantages of high availability are numerous: it makes it possible, for example, to better manage load peaks or even to improve the user experience which appreciates the reliability of the service. With regard to Chantepie, Pierre was able to appreciate the benefits of high availability during the updates “ the advantage of having these two firewalls is that there was no system outage, no computer outage during the update […] The user does not feel that we spent time to perform an update. Otherwise, we would have had to turn off, restart, wait a few minutes.»

What about open source in all this?

Beyond the values of freedom supported by Open Source, our interlocutor sees a direct financial advantage in not having to subscribe to subscriptions and not having to pay for licenses.
« The advantage of Open Source is that we are in Community mode, that is, we do not pay a subscription to anything. All we pay annually is maintenance téïcée. What's not bad is that we don't have a subscription for updates, subscriptions for licenses in all directions… Unlike an industrialist who will make us pay… the business is that he will try to sell us a lot of small options. Open Source is not the case. »

The rest of the adventures is coming soon

As for collaboration with téïcéeShe seems to have a bright future ahead of her. Pierre keeps a good impression since the beginning of the project with Aurélien Bonanni that he finds “ Easy to access and in a very good understanding of our problems. ” up to the maintenance that he mentions “efficient”, passing by the team itself whose responsiveness he appreciates “ The technicians respond quickly to our requests… at the network level we will stay at téïcée carefree ».
Similarly, Pierre plans to entrust maintenance to téïcée in the long term " it's not likely to change at this point with téïcée. ” and in terms of projects, our speaker would like to expand the solution OPNSense to the schools of Chantepie with enhanced filtering given the sensitive public represented by pupils’ They are children […] and we really need to refine the filtering part of the sites and be sure that they do not end up on any site. Aurélien Bonanni has grasped this problem well.».
To Pierre to conclude this testimony “ we remain in close collaboration with téïcée ».