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Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration

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Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration

#471

Post by bamboozled »

exdsq wrote: post #448
bamboozled wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If there's a local disaster that wipes out your office and your friends and all you can think about is data then you should ask a professional to screen you for sociopathy and whether you have any treatable mental illness. So you'd lose your friends and potentially your livelihood and any ability to financial support yourself, or any surviving friends or family, just because you don't want to use cloud backups or a…

How many times have you known this to happen? And how are you currently preparing your company against a solar flare?

I've definitely worked for companies where off-site backups are protected from the impacts of solar flares.

> How many times have you known this to happen?

That's irrelevant, if it can happen, it will happen, and it's too late once you've lost your data. Maybe for some businesses, data isn't important, but I don't know of many?

Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration

#472

Post by hackerfromthefu »

hackerfromthefu wrote: post #332
bamboozled wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not talking about people snooping your data, I'm talking about a configuration error or exploit which gives people access to your information. Maybe I am naive, but I think the chances of this happening on a cloud based service like Dropbox are going to be a lot lower.

It used to be the running joke that another large commercial database was just found unsecured on AWS! It's not as common in the last year or so which is a good sign!

Oh, here we go! Just a week ago, thousands of unsecured databases on AWS!

https://infosecwriteups.com/how-i-discovered-thousands-of-op...

Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration

#473

Post by axiolite »

rad_gruchalski wrote: post #385
axiolite wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to use 4Kn drives, SSDs (w/trim), or easily switch between RAID and HBA modes, I would recomend an R730 with H730 controller instead. They're available on eBay with 128GB of RAM for just over $1,000 USD. If you don't want those features, an R720 is a good choice, and around half the price. Idle power consumption of an R730 with no drives is typically about 85W, though higher-end CPUs drive that up a bit.…

Yes, R730 would have been better. I learned that post fact.

Not criticizing at all. The R720s are still excellent servers. You can add a different RAID/HBA controller into an R720, flash LSI firmware onto the one you've got, or just put a bit more effort into ensuring you buy compatible drives. SAS SSDs just a few years old didn't even have TRIM, for example.

Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration

#474

Post by kortilla »

fnord77 wrote: post #446
kortilla wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typical statement from someone that doesn’t actually pay the bill (a.k.a a software engineer in most companies). It’s easy to trivialize $20-30k a month when it’s someone else’s money and it’s less work for you.

When considering the cost of having a secure server room, a commercial internet line, electricity, cooling and hardware - plus the cost of my time (or someone else's on the team), AWS gets more and more attractive. The business side paying the bill agrees fully. People on my time would rather be developing software than doing sys admin stuff

> The business side paying the bill agrees fully.

No, they often don’t understand the alternatives available because the wolves are guarding the henhouse (software devs who don’t want to work with the pace of on-prem IT).

> People on my time would rather be developing software than doing sys admin stuff

No shit, that’s why software devs aren’t sysadmins.

Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration

#475

Post by rambojazz »

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…

42u for a home rack seems like excessive (unless you run all 3u-4u servers).

Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration

#476

Post by unity1001 »

Lamad123 wrote: post #462
unity1001 wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hetzner is pretty good in general. $70/month gets you a 16 vcpu VM with 2TB free egress/month. Their additional egress pricing is peanuts compared to Google. Google, AWS etc egress is so overpriced - as if we are still living in mid 2000s.

Sounds amazing, thank you guys!

Yep. You can even set up K8 networks. There is a project called 'kube hetzner' in github with which you can easily set up a cluster. There are even easier tutorials:

https://community.hetzner.com/tutorials/k3s-glusterfs-loadba...

Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration

#477

Post by trabant00 »

lambdaba wrote: post #417
trabant00 wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly are you interested in finding out? What I do every day? How you can find such work? Or?

Yes, basically if I could peek into your activity for a day it would be awesome (I'm not asking that, although I would like it :P :)). I'm just curious of what a day's work looks like.

Typical day is actually mostly working to go around corporate "security" limitations that restrict everybody to not being able to do much for fear they will do harm.

The last few days:

- we have a commercial ssh bastion that requires direct ssh login and then input ip address. So no dns available for sshing. I wrote a bash autocomplete script that resolves dns host entries and uses expect to automatically input the ip in the bastion. This is especially important to be able to run ansible.

- our gitlab has it's ssh filtered because "security". So you can only use a security token over http. This prevents us from being able to use git submodukes, as the token would be in ckear commited to the parent rep. So I wrote a make file to compose the project, basically a poor man git submodules.

You might find all the above trivial, and it is. But it keeps the work flowing and devips more junior than I have no clue about make files, expect, etc.

Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration

#478

Post by rad_gruchalski »

axiolite wrote: post #473
rad_gruchalski wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, R730 would have been better. I learned that post fact.

Not criticizing at all. The R720s are still excellent servers. You can add a different RAID/HBA controller into an R720, flash LSI firmware onto the one you've got, or just put a bit more effort into ensuring you buy compatible drives. SAS SSDs just a few years old didn't even have TRIM, for example.

Yeah, I believe it’s possible to fit the perc controller from r730 to r720 so that the throughput goes up to 6mbps but I just couldn’t be bothered.

Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration

#479

Post by antb123 »

nix23 wrote: post #403
tpetry wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's 2022 and we're about to rediscover something we know for 40 years already: mainframes have freaking performance.

>mainframes have freaking performance Yes and no, really depends for what workloads. But freaking reliability that's for sure.

reliability + security. performance is poor they were designed for batch.

Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration

#480

Post by nix23 »

antb123 wrote: post #479
nix23 wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>mainframes have freaking performance Yes and no, really depends for what workloads. But freaking reliability that's for sure.

reliability + security. performance is poor they were designed for batch.

>performance is poor they were designed for batch.

That's once again an oversimplification, performance is excellent for the intended workload.

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