Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration

pietrorea.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 485 posts

Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration

#261

Post by thequux »

glutamate wrote: post #204
bcrosby95 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a $200/month bare metal server For 1 bare metal server? You do know these things run on electricity, right?

https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-ax

For €400/mo all in, split between my friend and I, I've got an air-conditioned office at the local business park with the back room stuffed with ~10 servers, redundant internet links with BGP announcements of our /24 so failover is transparent, and all of that is 10 minutes walk from home. Granted, the setup is more than a bit YOLO; the servers are in two piles rather than a proper rack and the fiber to the servers is just flapping in the breeze from the AC, but we've been able to fix literally everything that went wrong except for a power outage ~a year ago when somebody got a bit overzealous with a backhoe within 30 minutes.

The main difference between what we've got and a proper setup is on the order of about €5k of fixed costs, all of which have a lifespan of ~decades. The savings from owning your own hardware might shock you.

Also, if you think that the "professional" hosts do any better, consider that that Hetzner box you linked is a desktop machine shoved onto a rack shelf.

Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration

#262

Post by christophilus »

rad_gruchalski wrote: post #208
c2h5oh wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember how surprised people were when I demoed a $200/month bare metal server outperforming by a huge margin RDS MySQL instance that they were paying something upwards of 16k/month. IIRC we ended up using it as a disposable replica for some non-real time but heavy operations.

I’ve picked up a second hand Dell R720 last year. Best purchase in years. It cost me €1500 for 48 cores and 192GB RAM.

I want one. What’s it done to your electricity bill, though?

Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration

#263

Post by thefingerer »

I was a great UNIX/IRIX/Linux sysadmin. Fantastic. Until I got to a corporation with a structure so large that I wasn't even allowed near the VMware vSphere or the physical hardware itself ((servers locked in the basement)), I was only allowed to install RHEL from images onto other images and keep them patched with Satellite and Ansible. But, disconnected from the front end (vmware) and the real tangible back end (physical hardware), I found myself hating the work and I stopped doing it. I found it quite insulting, to be "just the LINUX guy" cog in the machine.

Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration

#264

Post by luma »

thefingerer wrote: post #263

I was a great UNIX/IRIX/Linux sysadmin. Fantastic. Until I got to a corporation with a structure so large that I wasn't even allowed near the VMware vSphere or the physical hardware itself ((servers locked in the basement)), I was only allowed to install RHEL from images onto other images and keep them patched with Satellite and Ansible. But, disconnected from the front end (vmware) and the real tangible back end (ph…

Then become the VMWare guy (or whatever tech you see coming at you to take over your world). This industry changes quickly, expecting to be a skilled sysadmin on the same platform for more than a decade is a career killer.

Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration

#265

Post by outworlder »

senko wrote: post #160
viraptor wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's what the bare metal server didn't come with: API access for managing configuration, version updates/rollbacks, and ACL. A solution for unlimited scheduled snapshots without affecting performance. Close to immediate replacement of identical setup within seconds of failure. API-managed VPC/VPN built in. No underlying OS management. (Probably forgot a few...) I get that going bare metal is a good solution for som…

> Here's what the bare metal server didn't come with: [bunch of stuff I don't need] Exactly. Imagine paying for all that when all you need is bare metal. Now imagine paying for all that just because you've read on the Internet that it's best practice and that's what the big guys do. Way back the best practice was what Microsoft, Oracle or Cisco wanted you to buy. Now it's what Amazon wants you to buy. Buy what you ne…

> Exactly. Imagine paying for all that when all you need is bare metal.

Yes.

The opposite is also true though: Imagine not wanting to pay for that and needing it!

There's a reason why most homes connect to the power utility companies. Yes, we can run generators ourselves. Does it make sense to do that? Not usually.

Same thing with this server. If it makes sense for your use-case, outstanding. In many cases, people are better off offloading this to another company and focusing on their strengths.

Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration

#266

Post by gerdesj »

tomrod wrote: post #239
gerdesj wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What on earth are you running on your laptop?

Windows 11 with Edge. Nothing else /s But in all reality, laptops are really, really powerful these days.

I use customer cast offs and even employee cast offs. My desktop was cast off by a customer because Win 10 ground to a halt. I slapped an ancient nvidia card in to get a couple of screens and popped in a cheap SSD. According to dmidecode it is a Lenovo from 01/06/2012.

My laptop at the moment is a HPE something ... HP 250 G6 Notebook PC according to dmidecode. I used to have a five year old Dell 17" i7 based beast but it ... broke. I whipped out the SSD, shrank the root fs a bit (with gparted) and used a clonezilla disc and an external USB link to get my system onto a Samsung EVO M.2 thingie from the SSD. This laptop was an employee cast off/

As is probably apparent from the above, I use Linux. I have some decent apps at my disposal but in general I don't need much hardware. Decent: RAM >= 8GB and SSD storage are key. I don't play games much. I've always specified 17" screens in the past for my laptops but now I have to use a 15" jobbie, that's becoming less of a hard requirement.

I am a Managing Director (small business - IT consultancy) but I do spend rather a lot of my time doing sysadmin and network admin stuff. I also do business apps. I once wrote a Finite Capacity Plan for a factory in Excel with rather a lot of VBA. Before you take the piss, bear in mind I used the term finite and not infinite. That meant that quite a few people had employment in Plymouth (Devon not MA) in the 1990s. I won't bore you with my more modern failures 8)

Anyway as you say, modern laptops are phenomenally powerful. Mine have wobbly windows 8) I can't be arsed with MS Windows anymore for my own gear - it gets in the way. Me and the wife said goodbye at Windows 7.

Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration

#267

Post by chasil »

encryptluks2 wrote: post #42
chasil wrote: post #3

-"As for scripting, commit to getting good at Bash." That advice can cause substantial headache on Ubuntu/Debian, where the Almquist shell is /bin/sh. This does not implement much of bash and will fail spectacularly on the simplest of scripts. This is also an issue on systems using Busybox. A useful approach to scripting is to grasp the POSIX shell first, then facets of bash and Korn as they are needed. -"As a practi…

> -"As a practical goal, you should be able to recreate your host with a single Bash script." I disagree with this. A single bash script configuring an entire hosts can be overly complex and very difficult to follow. As someone who has created complex bash scripts, this will become very time consuming and prevent you from making many changes without significant efforts. I'd suggest familiarizing yourself with tools l…

"Relax and Recover" (rear) is a useful tool, written specifically in the bash dialect, that will write a compressed clone of your system to a bootable USB flash drive, network share (NFS/SMB), and other targets.

Booting with rear, a (somewhat "klunky") interface will allow you to restore your captured backup, apparently pristine.

It is similar in effect to the HP-UX Ignite tool that I used on that platform.

Oracle has published a number of articles and blogs on or relating to it, and it is well worth study. The invocation of tar that preserves the SELinux contexts is particularly worth capturing.

Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration

#268

Post by MonaroVXR »

papito wrote: post #111
c2h5oh wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember how surprised people were when I demoed a $200/month bare metal server outperforming by a huge margin RDS MySQL instance that they were paying something upwards of 16k/month. IIRC we ended up using it as a disposable replica for some non-real time but heavy operations.

LOL. Priceless. Having these skills is very valuable. Us old farts used to do a lot with what today would be called "bootstrapped". Scarcity is no longer a "problem", except that it is. Scarcity keeps you sharp, efficient, on the edge - where you need to be. It's also - cheaper.

As a young person I agree with you.

Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration

#269

Post by Osiris »

lrvick wrote: post #61

I have over 20 years of Linux/FreeBSD sysadmin experience ranging from universities to major silicon valley companies in both cloud and on-prem. When it comes to companies I mostly support cloud these days but when it comes to me and my family I accept every downside and host as almost all of our digital lives in a 42u rack in a gutted closet in our house with static IPs and business fiber. I know where our data live…

What do you do for off-site backups?

Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration

#270

Post by ineedasername »

A simple LAMP stack is a good place to start, and a single droplet from DO or similar is plenty to play around with and standup a real internet-facing system. Bonus points for starting vanilla and installing & configuring the AMP portion from scratch, which is an excellent primer on the basics of system config & admin.

Get your hands a little dirtier installing a lightweight desktop environment like LXDE, programming language of choice & an IDE. Install VNC and you then have a cloud desktop you can code in from anywhere at the same time that it runs your personal website.

Cost: ~$5 per month and a bunch of good experience. Or just do it once as an exercise and cancel after a month.

Post reply on HN