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The Lost Art of System Administration

matt-rickard.com

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Re: The Lost Art of System Administration

#31

Post by LMYahooTFY »

keyle wrote: post #7
h2odragon wrote: post #4

I recall a push of "sysadmins are just glorified janitors, we don't need them" around 2005? or thereabouts. Since then it seems there's been a lot of work put into dealing with broken, chaotic systems and how to use them anyway.

Reminds of the IBM story. They had an IT department. Things were smooth. Nothing ever went bad. So they sacked 50% of them thinking they do nothing but hang around... and everything went to hell. Someone can probably point to or correlate that story better. But essentially the human nature of business is, if something runs smooth, it needs fixing.

This seems like a very interesting story if true.

Anyone have a link and/or know more?

Re: The Lost Art of System Administration

#32

Post by GauntletWizard »

unboxingelf wrote: post #18
silverfox17 wrote: post #11

This seems a bit generalized. Yes, infrastructure as code/etc. are becoming more prevalent, but underneath there are still systems running. While a lot of jobs can abstract away these things, they are still there, and very real. If more people had an understanding of the underlying operating systems and file systems we could mitigate a lot of vulnerabilities, or find performance issues that may otherwise be obstructe…

Comparing kubernetes to a sysadmin manually provisioning a LAMP stack is like comparing a home kitchen to commercial factory. They can both make a pizza, but one can make an order of magnitude more - at same time. They’re solving two different problems.

I'm a dude who uses Kubernetes to make pizzas. Kubeternetes is absolutely a commercial bakery class machine, but much of it's adoption is due to the fact that for just a bit more in price and effort, you can have that class of machine in your home and run real things on it.

Seriously: I run clusters from a few dozen nodes (down from a few hundred at my peak, sigh) down to a trio of Raspberry Pis in my living room. They're overkill by a little bit, but not by much. And it's definitely my ambition to make the tooling even easier and even more powerful, such that every small home can run something with enterprise level reliability.

Re: The Lost Art of System Administration

#33

Post by glintik »

unboxingelf wrote: post #18
silverfox17 wrote: post #11

This seems a bit generalized. Yes, infrastructure as code/etc. are becoming more prevalent, but underneath there are still systems running. While a lot of jobs can abstract away these things, they are still there, and very real. If more people had an understanding of the underlying operating systems and file systems we could mitigate a lot of vulnerabilities, or find performance issues that may otherwise be obstructe…

Comparing kubernetes to a sysadmin manually provisioning a LAMP stack is like comparing a home kitchen to commercial factory. They can both make a pizza, but one can make an order of magnitude more - at same time. They’re solving two different problems.

Wrong comparison, sorry. K8s is enterprise thing, while LAMP is good for SOHO. So cookies factory vs small bakery.

Re: The Lost Art of System Administration

#34

Post by avgcorrection »

keyle wrote: post #8

I 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…

I grew up with Unix 1 and a soldering iron.

I feel sad for my kids who will grow up with ms-dos and high-level languages and not have a clue how things really work.

Whither civilization?

Re: The Lost Art of System Administration

#35

Post by throwaway892238 »

Most of those things listed are just technical details that change over time. Before all the Linux trivia there was the Solaris trivia, AIX trivia, Novell, HP/UX, Windows NT, OS/2, VMS, AS/400. Alpha, Sparc, VAX, tape robots, IPX/SPX, Token ring, VT100 dumb terminals. Old heads have forgotten more technical crap than exists today. (I can barely remember how to set up a Cisco router, and I used to work there.. I do, however, remember to turn off spanning tree)

The technical stuff changes but Systems Administration remains the same practice. You figure out how to put together a complex system, how to maintain it, keep it highly available. Operations is the work of keeping the business afloat through IT, and Systems Administration will be a part of that as long as there are Systems to Administrate. The title will change, because apparently people are squeamish about being lumped into a group with people who aren't all cutting edge. But the art won't be lost. It lives in every woman who stays up til 3am to ensure maintenance goes as planned, and every man who tells the developers, "No, I'm not giving you root on all the servers, tell me what you want to do. You just want to copy a file? You don't need root for that. ...."

Re: The Lost Art of System Administration

#37

Post by ipnon »

green-salt wrote: post #36

All those sysadmin skills are needed to create the "serverless" runtime platform to run everything on.

Like everything that can be run on a computer, it is eventually abstracted. Once it is abstracted it can become commodified. Once it is commodified it is effectively irrelevant how it is run on the computer!

Re: The Lost Art of System Administration

#38

Post by green-salt »

ipnon wrote: post #37
green-salt wrote: post #36

All those sysadmin skills are needed to create the "serverless" runtime platform to run everything on.

Like everything that can be run on a computer, it is eventually abstracted. Once it is abstracted it can become commodified. Once it is commodified it is effectively irrelevant how it is run on the computer!

Absolutely! I tend to be the one deploying the physical architecture so it still feels very real haha.

Re: The Lost Art of System Administration

#39

Post by Pilottwave »

Test0129 wrote: post #23
boston_clone wrote: post #9

Isn'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.

DevOps = Development & Operations... Used to be about one person/team practicing both. However specialization is a thing, so there are "DevOps Engineers" who focus solely on getting the container management and CI&CD pipelines set up; and not writing actual application code. I don't see how its unrelated to engineering, since its all software that needs to be written/configured/understood.

Re: The Lost Art of System Administration

#40

Post by gorgoiler »

Ironically, the one computer where I still have to maintain multi process discipline, with a boot and init system, hardware management, multiple users, and low level filesystem stuff is… my desktop PC!

We used to think “the year of the Linux desktop” would be the extension of the Linux ecosystem to include both servers and desktops. Now that Linux personal computers are finally mainstream — at least for people like us — will it instead turn out to be an exodus from the former to the latter?

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