My manager spent $1M on a backup server that I never used • Hacker News Board

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

#191

Post by jiggawatts » Fri, Mar 03, 2023, 10:53 AM UTC

dijit wrote: post #181

jiggawatts wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 capa…

I'm well aware of the existence of powershell and CMD, such things are not a real luxury when you're limited to whatever Windows provides you with as utilities as opposed to the astonishingly wide plethora of commandline utilities available else where (where everything is a file and is easy to read, parse, filter, save-). Windows 2012r2 came with Powershell 4.0, which I'm sure you'll agree was limited in ways that ba…

Export-Csv was introduced in PowerShell v1.0: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/...

> but it's not as simple as `ssh user@host`

It is literally that simple. Nay, simpler, because authentication is automatic and secure:

    Enter-PSSession 'hostname'

Oh, I'm sorry... too verbose and readable.

    etsn 'hostname'

> since bash is a collection of utilities[1] and doesn't require deep integration with the platform to function.

You're also unaware of just how elegant PowerShell's extensibility model is. It runs circles around traditional shells, because you can whip up a new "native" command in just minutes, but with features that would take a week of C programming against the Unix byte-oriented pipeline.

The first time I saw something like this, it blew my mind:

    Import-Csv 'serverspec.csv' | New-VM

I wrote some spectacularly complex scripts in bash, and it always felt like digging through dirt, looking for nuggets of gold that everyone promises is there, but I just can't find it.

[1] Those utilities are hilariously inconsistent not just between each other, but between distros and even distro versions. E.g.: SSH is so easy, right? Okay, write me a script that can create a sudo-enabled user and install an SSH key for them on every popular Linux made in the last decade. Include Redhat, Ubuntu, Amazon Linux, and whatever else is reasonable. Three "Linux admins" failed at this task, and I had to resort to using ChatGPT and then fixing up the result by testing it against a dozen VMs that took me a day to spin up.

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

#192

Post by x98asfd » Fri, Mar 03, 2023, 10:55 AM UTC

sshagent wrote: post #172

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 -…

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".

Please read @hnlmorg in the sibling thread. PowerShell, etc seems to be ms business move to woo developers (oh we have a shell too now).

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

#193

Post by JamesonNetworks » Fri, Mar 03, 2023, 11:12 AM UTC

jiggawatts wrote: post #191

dijit wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm well aware of the existence of powershell and CMD, such things are not a real luxury when you're limited to whatever Windows provides you with as utilities as opposed to the astonishingly wide plethora of commandline utilities available else where (where everything is a file and is easy to read, parse, filter, save-). Windows 2012r2 came with Powershell 4.0, which I'm sure you'll agree was limited in ways that ba…

Export-Csv was introduced in PowerShell v1.0: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/... > but it's not as simple as `ssh user@host` It is literally that simple. Nay, simpler , because authentication is automatic and secure: Enter-PSSession 'hostname' Oh, I'm sorry... too verbose and readable. etsn 'hostname' > since bash is a collection of utilities[1] and doesn't require deep integration with t…

This is a great discussion from everyone! I have learned a lot about Powershell here, so thank you!

That said, the comparison to a homogenous windows env and a mixed flavor linux environment is disingenuous. Using multiple flavors of linux is just multiple OSes, of which Windows would be another. The best advice here is to stick to one flavor of linux, which should be possible because there are no licensing fees!

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

#194

Post by jiggawatts » Fri, Mar 03, 2023, 11:14 AM UTC

olavgg wrote: post #174

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 -…

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.

It has hundreds of pages of clear documentation, video training, you name it.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/learn...

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/training/paths/get-started...

It is also far more discoverable than any other shell I've ever used. Install PowerShell 7 on Linux now. e.g.: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/insta...

Now try some of these commands. Can you guess what they do?

    Get-Command Export-*

    dir | Get-Member Last*

    Get-Help Sort-Object -Full

    dir | Sort-Object LastWriteTime -Desc | Export-Csv 'files.csv'

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

#195

Post by jiggawatts » Fri, Mar 03, 2023, 11:19 AM UTC

dijit wrote: post #189

jiggawatts wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 prefer Windows because of things like Active Directory, GPOs, DSC I felt the same until we had a bug which broke the network adapters under high throughput of packets per second (of course, we didn't know the cause, but the machine was bumped off the network until a reboot which wiped away debug info). Going via the IPMI yielded a "Can't connect to AD" message, and the rotating local "Administrator" account passw…

> The base container image needs to match the kernel version

The kernel ABI has been stabilised in 2022 & 11, which means this is no longer an issue. I tested it and it seems to work as advertised. E.g.: both Windows 11 and 11 22H2 OS can both run a variety of 2022 and 2019 containers, and can run "RTM" and semi-annual 2022 containers in process isolation mode.

> the instructions to make a bare metal kubernetes windows worker node are sporadic, outdated and otherwise largely missing.

I wouldn't even try. Just use Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), AWS EKS, or something similar.

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

#196

Post by jiggawatts » Fri, Mar 03, 2023, 11:24 AM UTC

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…

> joining to the domain requires a reboot

For large farms of Windows servers this is done in the base image, it finishes the first boot already domain-joined.

Windows Server has a built-in service for remotely imaging servers over the network that integrates with this.

When in Rome, do as the Romans do.

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

#197

Post by aae42 » Fri, Mar 03, 2023, 11:25 AM UTC

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 -…

Winrm is nowhere near equivalent to SSH. It's terrible. Just try using anything that uses window's DPAPI over winrm. You have no such limitations with SSH. Also it's authentication mechanisms are vastly superior (SSH key pairs).

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

#198

Post by jiggawatts » Fri, Mar 03, 2023, 11:33 AM UTC

throw009 wrote: post #183

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…

>He joined in 2014, when Windows had a superior shell and remoting system that eliminates the requirement for low-level string parsing tools like sed/awk entirely! One mans feature is another mans bug.

These debates always remind me of this quote (referring to C++) here on HN by another user:

    It seems like grappling with these arcane features feels productive, at first.
    You enter a flow state and after a while, something works that didn’t work before.
    It’s only when you step back and ask what actually got accomplished that you realize it’s time wasted.

That's what Linux feels like to me. People enjoy solving arcane problems, digging through man pages, download esoteric commands. Heck I enjoy this stuff too! Recently I had a lot of fun playing around with parallel compression tools available on Linux.

It's fun... but it's rarely as productive as not having to deal with the challenge in the first place.

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

#199

Post by aae42 » Fri, Mar 03, 2023, 11:34 AM UTC

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…

> For 10-1000 servers that aren't all identical, I prefer Windows because of things like Active Directory, GPOs, DSC, etc...

I run over 1000 Windows boxes and AD/GPOs are terrible. GPOs are spaghetti by design. There are no concepts of infrastructure as code with these tools, and they're quickly becoming liabilities at any scale. There aren't any real ways of making repeatable and reversible changes so these infrastructures via code. Broaden your horizons a bit and you'll notice these are not the way.

Using Chef on top to manage DSC is the only thing that allows me to keep my sanity, and the more config I pull out of GPO and AD the happier everyone becomes, and the safer all of our systems are. Windows is terrible because it's too heavyweight and too opaque. It is the opposite of an agile choice of operating system.

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

#200

Post by alex7734 » Fri, Mar 03, 2023, 11:42 AM UTC

jeremyjh wrote: post #87

anyfoo wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to elaborate?

Well, spending 3 months proving that MySQL can reliably store data raised an eyebrow. I mean, we are talking about gamer profiles here. Worrying about whether or not the log is on the same volume as the table really seems like a bit much in that context. Even worrying about fsync is honestly questionable.

Some of the MariaDB 10.1 versions trivially corrupted themselves by just loading them up with writes a bit, no crashes or power issues involved.

One of the 10.6 versions had (has?) a bug where a connection sometimes simply does not die ever, even after disconnecting and killing the query using the KILL sql command, so it never releases its slot (which matters if you have lots of connections), although to be fair I've only hit that once since we upgraded to 10.6.

Frankly I prefer MySQL and friends over Postgres simply because that's what I always used and I find it familiar (plus I don't like the process based concurrency that Postgres has, while I haven't really tried it to see if it matters, process creation is fairly expensive in Windows to use as a concurrency mechanism and limits the numbers of connections a lot more than threads), but let's not deny reality here, MySQL has never been rock-solid and a glance at its source code should be enough to tell you why.

As for your disregard for performance issues, it's hard to say if it's warranted without knowing the numbers and the load profile but it's probably preferable to spend the time to test it properly than having to fix everything in a hurry later with customers screaming at you over the phone.

Plus I like programs built to be snappy and fast, a good practice that sadly has been lost to time.