Eh, maybe in some spaces. As a system software developer (computers embedded in the product), I spent today inspecting the environment variables and command line args of running processes.
The Lost Art of System Administration
21–30 of 98 posts
Re: The Lost Art of System Administration
#22Isn't modern system administration very much still a thing, just with a different name: devops? I worked with a really bright (sysadmin/devops) guy that built out a FOSS configuration management service using saltstack and zabbix; a near real-time visualized platform of critical assets that also afforded a great deal of control, all from a distance. I do very much agree that use of command line is declining, though;…
There are other titles as well like SRE or cloud admin/architect
Re: The Lost Art of System Administration
#23Isn't modern system administration very much still a thing, just with a different name: devops? I worked with a really bright (sysadmin/devops) guy that built out a FOSS configuration management service using saltstack and zabbix; a near real-time visualized platform of critical assets that also afforded a great deal of control, all from a distance. I do very much agree that use of command line is declining, though;…
sysadmin used to be an actual title of a specific person responsible for managing the company's systems.
These days it's devops, but now there are no specific devops people and it's yet another task unrelated to engineering regularly thrown onto engineering's plate.
Re: The Lost Art of System Administration
#24Isn't it knowing kubernetes now? Which does kinda tend to require you to also know a fair bit of "single machine" admin tools along with a whole slew of new complexity.
I have built a lot of stuff on kubernetes. Outside of certain edge cases I've had to use almost none of the actual system administration knowledge I have. The vast majority of things are relatively simple, or can be handled via a nice UI provided by .
In fact, I'd argue that kubernetes was really made to remove sysadmin from being needed. For large kubes obviously some skill is needed but in the average case a developer can do 99.9% of all the work needed. It was a huge boon for businesses that would otherwise have to pay both developers and sysadmins. Now they can pay one of them half the value!
The majority of other sysadmin tasks have been offloaded to cloud providers. For example, AWS makes setting up a network topology/compute/etc very easy. Sometimes these tasks are handled by SRE, a lot of times they are handled again by developers. Terraform really brought everything together in an absolutely brainless mechanism to get things started (with the subsequent pitfalls).
Re: The Lost Art of System Administration
#25The fact that linux systems need adminstration is one of the reasons why they suck.
Imagine after buying a macbook that you also need to hire a sysadmin to keep it running smoothly? The idea is laughable.
> Learning how to effectively use the command line. Unix philosophy. Pipes, scripting, and tooling. So much of programming is stitching things together.
This is really bad. Much of the complexity in contemporary software architecture arises from this mentality.
"Do things by stitching programs together" only works for relatively simple tasks. For everything else you need to program the thing properly.
One of the worst ways this manifests is in how websites are built: use a combination of a scripting language, a database server, an http server, a memory cache server, etc.
I'm really grateful we have things like Go and SQLite that make it possible to create fully functional websites as self-contained programs instead of the hot mess that everything else uses.
Re: The Lost Art of System Administration
#26I grew up with spectrums and ms-dos with a turbo and a reset button. I feel sad for my kids who will grow up with iPads and Windows 14 PCs with not the slightest clue on how things are running and the OS shielding them from crashing the thing or running viruses for fun. Same things for young lads that come out of university today with their degrees. They're well spoken and can recite algo theory like nothing but stil…
> Have we reached that level of the civilisation that goes extinct, for forgetting how its own inner machines work?
Probably. Almost nobody under the age of 40 works in the "deep weeds" anymore (firmware, kernel, casually "Ring 0 and below" spaces). A decade ago, it was about 30. I'm the last wave, it seems, of people in these spaces, and that's quite terrifying.
But I get it. The hardware is maddeningly complex, rapidly getting more complex to solve the problems created by the last complexity, and the whole stack is cracking and crumbling around the edges (the uarch vulns and Intel pulling SGX from consumer chips are a reflection of this). Another decade, this entire low level group will have retired to something far away from computers, and... we'll see what happens. Nothing good, I fear.
Re: The Lost Art of System Administration
#27Isn't it knowing kubernetes now? Which does kinda tend to require you to also know a fair bit of "single machine" admin tools along with a whole slew of new complexity.
I have built a lot of stuff on kubernetes. Outside of certain edge cases I've had to use almost none of the actual system administration knowledge I have. The vast majority of things are relatively simple, or can be handled via a nice UI provided by . In fact, I'd argue that kubernetes was really made to remove sysadmin from being needed. For large kubes obviously some skill is needed but in the average case a develo…
> Now they can pay one of them half the value!
They’re paying the other half of the value to the cloud provider, more or less. Ideally, perhaps a bit less. But that’s how business works. The cloud provider is operating these systems much better than 99+% of companies could hope to do.
Re: The Lost Art of System Administration
#28The fact that linux systems need adminstration is one of the reasons why they suck. Imagine after buying a macbook that you also need to hire a sysadmin to keep it running smoothly? The idea is laughable. > Learning how to effectively use the command line. Unix philosophy. Pipes, scripting, and tooling. So much of programming is stitching things together. This is really bad. Much of the complexity in contemporary sof…
Windows needs sysadmins too, and Mac does as well. There are group policies and all sorts of other tools out there for managing Macs. Apple even has documentation on this.
Someone who is running a newer Linux desktop distro is not going to need sysadmin experience to web browse and read email. The same way someone using Windows or a Mac for a desktop distro isn't going to need sysadmin experience, either.
As for your websites, no one is going to build a simple website that needs a dedicated database server, a "memory cache server", or whatever. Those issues become relevant with scale.
Re: The Lost Art of System Administration
#29No post body was provided.
Re: The Lost Art of System Administration
#30The fact that linux systems need adminstration is one of the reasons why they suck. Imagine after buying a macbook that you also need to hire a sysadmin to keep it running smoothly? The idea is laughable. > Learning how to effectively use the command line. Unix philosophy. Pipes, scripting, and tooling. So much of programming is stitching things together. This is really bad. Much of the complexity in contemporary sof…
>The fact that linux systems need adminstration is one of the reasons why they suck.
Do you buy and string together several MacBooks to run your business's custom built ERP system 24/7/365?
There isn't a vast ecosystem of open source solutions to enterprise problems because that's not what macOS is, or attempts to be.
I can't tell if this is a serious response or not, this comparison seems pretty ridiculous.