Axel Drelon

student, sysadmin & network engineer

I'm in my third year of a computer science degree in Lille, working as a systems and network administrator apprentice at Sweeek. On the side, I freelance in datacenters: server maintenance, on-site interventions and remote managed services.

What I care about is infrastructure, networking and self-hosting. I learn by building things myself: I install them by hand, break them, fix them, and write down what I understood.

Working on a Dell server at Equinix
The Juniper MX80 of my AS, racked
My Proxmox server in its rack

Projects

  • OpenStack POC, installed by hand ↗2026

    A challenge from a teacher: run OpenStack 2026.1 on a single VM on my Proxmox, without Kolla or DevStack, to understand every piece. Keystone, Glance, Nova, Neutron on Open vSwitch and Horizon, installed one by one until a regular user could launch an instance and SSH into it. It's all documented, pitfalls included: a % in a password that takes Keystone down, or an OVS agent that reports itself alive while doing nothing.

    read the POC ↗
  • My self-hosted infrain prod

    All my services run on a Debian VM behind NAT with no open ports: Traefik behind a Cloudflare Tunnel, with CrowdSec filtering every route. Any new Docker Compose stack with the right label goes live on its own subdomain without touching DNS. It also runs the BookStack where I publish my docs.

  • Verdantin dev

    My app to follow my CIC and Société Générale accounts in one place, through Open Banking (PSD2). It syncs transactions in the background and spots transfers between my own accounts so they don't count as spending.

  • Infrastructure as code on Proxmoxongoing

    Learning IaC on my own server: cloud-init VMs and LXC containers described with OpenTofu, created and destroyed on demand, with no secrets in the repo.

  • IPv6 network (AS216255) ↗2023 – 2026

    My own AS on the Internet, with a Juniper MX80 racked in Paris. That's where I really learned BGP: announcing my IPv4 and IPv6 prefixes, managing my routes, and figuring out why things break. Shut down since.

Right now

I'm building my own cloud gaming rig: Windows on a dedicated Ryzen machine, streamed with Apollo and Moonlight, reachable from anywhere through Tailscale. I'm also trying to read my Mazda 3's CAN bus to show fuel consumption in CarPlay.

Experience

  • Datacenter Engineer, France · Freelance, Virtuo Holdings Inc.2024–now
  • Systems & network administrator (apprenticeship) · SweeekJune 2026–now
  • Crew member · Lolyslam (Quick)2023
  • Observation internship · LEVELUP Cluster2021
  • Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science (BUT) · Université de Lille2024–now
  • French Baccalaureate · Lycée Baggio2024
  • Middle school diploma (Brevet) · Collège Saint-Joseph2022

Contact

The easiest way is an email to axel@flyxo.pro. I'm also on Matrix (@saule19:matrix.org), and my code is on GitHub.