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My manager spent $1M on a backup server that I never used

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Re: My manager spent $1M on a backup server that I never used

#171

Post by hnlmorg »

jiggawatts wrote: post #163
sgt wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you talking about - Windows was always terrible for an admin. Unix was and is vastly superior when it comes to remote admin. Having used both (Powershell is powerful yes, but it's nowhere as fluid as a Unix shell).

That's just not true. It feels true to Unix admins trying to do Unix things on Windows and getting frustrated when nothing feels familiar. Let me quote the article directly: "no SSH" WinRM is roughly equivalent and superior in many ways. E.g.: It takes quite the effort to produce a report of "some setting or flag" across a fleet of servers with SSH, Bash, Sed, Awk, etc.. Now try this with PowerShell: Invoke-Command -…

> Try this with Linux. Seriously. Sit down and do the equivalent: many servers in parallel

On my phone so not going to type the full command line out ostensibly it would be:

  xargs ssh ‘ps process-name’
I’d need to pull the man pages up to double check which flags you’ve specifically requested. But the above is the general gist of it.

——

I think it’s pointless to compare such granular features side by side though. For every microscopic thing Windows better Linux will have others it does better too. And visa versa. It’s the overall administration at a higher level I’m more interested in:

How long does it take to go from a new requirement to a deployed service? How easy is it to automate? To adapt? To scale? To fix? Or even forget fixing entirely and just run as a fleet of ephemeral instances.

Windows can and does support everything Linux does too. But Linux is just generally easier to work with (in my 30 years of experience managing both).

I wouldn’t say Linux is the peak of UNIX-like systems either though. But that’s a whole other argument for another day :)

Re: My manager spent $1M on a backup server that I never used

#172

Post by sshagent »

jiggawatts wrote: post #163
sgt wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you talking about - Windows was always terrible for an admin. Unix was and is vastly superior when it comes to remote admin. Having used both (Powershell is powerful yes, but it's nowhere as fluid as a Unix shell).

That's just not true. It feels true to Unix admins trying to do Unix things on Windows and getting frustrated when nothing feels familiar. Let me quote the article directly: "no SSH" WinRM is roughly equivalent and superior in many ways. E.g.: It takes quite the effort to produce a report of "some setting or flag" across a fleet of servers with SSH, Bash, Sed, Awk, etc.. Now try this with PowerShell: Invoke-Command -…

I'm sorry, but this comes across as exactly the same kind of bias as the author. "my knowledge of windows sysadmin methods means Unix methods are crap".

I'm afraid it's horses for courses, it's always been. We'll all pick our own preferences of course,but let's not assume total superiority over "them".

Re: My manager spent $1M on a backup server that I never used

#173

Post by blitzar »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #48
kubb wrote: post #8

My manager doesn't do almost anything. I wonder why they keep him around. He has like two reports and we're both fully self-directed. He can't understand technical issues, and whenever he proposes something, it's completely untenable due to his lack of understanding what's useful or possible.

It is definitely possible they indeed don't do anything. Fwiw though - a decade ago when I was a sysadmin I had a manager that I was certain never did anything. And then he was replaced. And then... We realized how much politics, uncertainty, churn, screaming, changing requirements, ambiguous priorities and other carp he protected us from :-/ Not saying it's the case with your manager. But managers have duties roles…

A good manager should protect you from the bullshit from above them, while making sure you are still known to exist and get recognition for your work from above.

Re: My manager spent $1M on a backup server that I never used

#174

Post by olavgg »

jiggawatts wrote: post #163
sgt wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you talking about - Windows was always terrible for an admin. Unix was and is vastly superior when it comes to remote admin. Having used both (Powershell is powerful yes, but it's nowhere as fluid as a Unix shell).

That's just not true. It feels true to Unix admins trying to do Unix things on Windows and getting frustrated when nothing feels familiar. Let me quote the article directly: "no SSH" WinRM is roughly equivalent and superior in many ways. E.g.: It takes quite the effort to produce a report of "some setting or flag" across a fleet of servers with SSH, Bash, Sed, Awk, etc.. Now try this with PowerShell: Invoke-Command -…

The big problem with Powershell vs Unix is lack of documentation. Seriously, everything takes 100x less time to figure out on a Unix platform than Powershell. And my life is to short for that.

Re: My manager spent $1M on a backup server that I never used

#176

Post by dijit »

merpkz wrote: post #166
jiggawatts wrote: post #158

This rant starts of pretty badly, with "Windows bad, Unix good, Windows especially bad because it doesn't have Unix tools". Reverse that statement. Is Unix bad because it doesn't Windows tools? > but simultaneously there was nothing to lean back on: no shell, no Unix tools like sed/awk, no SSH. I He joined in 2014, when Windows had a superior shell and remoting system that eliminates the requirement for low-level str…

I know people will now argue into oblivion about powershell vs bash, but I actually wonder why was this person hired in first place to manage windows based systems what clearly seems not be his domain of expertise?

In my experience it is often better to hire people who are curious, motivated and at least a little bit intelligent than people who already possess specific skills.

You can argue until you're blue in the face about if my approach was the right one, ultimately though what we did worked, was incredibly lean, easy to understand/troubleshoot/debug and most importantly it served the goals of the business.

Could we have gotten up to speed with the Windows way of doing things?

Probably.

There were so many niggling problems with the platform that were not part of my prejudice, that if we continued to go that route I am certain that 1000's of our person-hours would have been consumed even if we had been absolute experts, things like the fact that windows bonding in 2012R2 was done in userland, that joining to the domain requires a reboot (which will break your software if it's registering to take workloads on boot), that powershell versions are often incompatible and that interface devices are very difficult to deterministically reference.

Windows sysadmins seem to come in two varieties:

1) Experts who know exactly what Windows is thinking at all times

2) Button mashers

Unix/Linux engineers have a much broader range of knowledge, and there's certainly more of them on the senior end.

Re: My manager spent $1M on a backup server that I never used

#177

Post by jiggawatts »

hnlmorg wrote: post #171
jiggawatts wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just not true. It feels true to Unix admins trying to do Unix things on Windows and getting frustrated when nothing feels familiar. Let me quote the article directly: "no SSH" WinRM is roughly equivalent and superior in many ways. E.g.: It takes quite the effort to produce a report of "some setting or flag" across a fleet of servers with SSH, Bash, Sed, Awk, etc.. Now try this with PowerShell: Invoke-Command -…

> Try this with Linux. Seriously. Sit down and do the equivalent: many servers in parallel On my phone so not going to type the full command line out ostensibly it would be: xargs ssh ‘ps process-name’ I’d need to pull the man pages up to double check which flags you’ve specifically requested. But the above is the general gist of it. —— I think it’s pointless to compare such granular features side by side though. For…

> But the above is the general gist of it.

It's not even remotely the gist of it. The output of that is formatted (pretty-printed) text, not CSV. You won't know which computer the output came from. You can't use this output in any meaningful way. It's not useful to the business.

ssh can't connect to multiple servers at once (other tools like multissh can). However, most such tools aren't designed for and aren't capable of scaling up to a thousand or more servers.

Windows PowerShell and WinRM can, yet people like you just blindly dismiss it, assuming that it "must" be worse than Unix/Linux, since everyone knows that Windows doesn't even have a shell!

To quote the original article: "there was nothing to lean back on: no shell"

Windows has a shell, the author of the article just wasn't aware of its existence, let alone its comparative feature set.

Re: My manager spent $1M on a backup server that I never used

#178

Post by radicalbyte »

jiggawatts wrote: post #169
radicalbyte wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on exactly what and how you're doing it. I have as devops managed both a small fleet of windows boxes (~20 machines) an a similar amount of Unix (Linx-based) machines. Remote management of Windows was initially a pain to set up but once it was running it was fantastic. Being able to manage the entire application layer with properly tested, versioned code written in C# is an absolute killer. Things like deb…

I agree with everything you've said, but to add to that: there are these weird inflection points with both platforms. A single "small business" server is easier to run on Windows and it'll do everything you need it to do with minimal fuss. Easy GUI admin consoles are available, etc... For 2-3 servers it swings back to Linux because some things are just easier at that scale. For 10-1000 servers that aren't all identic…

> I agree with everything you've said, but to add to that: there are these weird inflection points with both platforms.

Spot on.. and I do like both platforms with a slight favour for Linux because licensing can be a hassle (unless MS still do those special Enterprise deals and you have one) and you can kind of get around the messy Linux things and it's generally easier to work with unknowns/new things in Linux (as the MS world abstracts too much).

It's good that we have the options and any adult Developer/Systems Admin would recognise that and take advantage of it.

Re: My manager spent $1M on a backup server that I never used

#179

Post by merpkz »

dijit wrote: post #176
merpkz wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know people will now argue into oblivion about powershell vs bash, but I actually wonder why was this person hired in first place to manage windows based systems what clearly seems not be his domain of expertise?

In my experience it is often better to hire people who are curious, motivated and at least a little bit intelligent than people who already possess specific skills. You can argue until you're blue in the face about if my approach was the right one, ultimately though what we did worked, was incredibly lean, easy to understand/troubleshoot/debug and most importantly it served the goals of the business. Could we have go…

It's counterproductive to hire people who go against established procedures and built systems at company just because they have high quality opinions about one piece of software or another.

Re: My manager spent $1M on a backup server that I never used

#180

Post by [deleted] »

dijit wrote: post #79
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. This reads like the $1 million system did what the company needed it to do (safely archive code to prevent more loss of old games) but it didn’t do exactly what this developer wanted. There are various good points scattered in the article for the author’s specific use case, but it’s written as if the entire company was mistaken to not make this decision revolve around this one developer.

Hi, Author here. thanks for reading my poorly written rant! The issue was that nobody ever said what the system was designed for and equally nobody was open to the idea of doing things differently until things went pop. The main thesis of the article is supposed to be that it doesn't matter what something costs or how much money is invested if it doesn't solve your needs. I wrote it a long time ago in a fit of aggrav…

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