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The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers

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Re: The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers

#241

Post by sshconnection »

Twirrim wrote: post #148
toyg wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But it isn't all that hard to understand a clean Unix. I have never copied or typed a command that I don't understand. Well, good for you. I can assure you that it's not the case for almost anyone who approached Linux after the likes of Mandrake were released and/or tried to make it work on anything different from a traditional server. I'm all for trying to understand what one is doing (and I wholeheartedly agree w…

That's why you get someone who is capable of understanding it. You wouldn't hire some high school kid who's just about taught themselves HTML by reading a book for a week, and get them to write your web application from ground up. You'd hire someone who knows what they're doing. Why is it seen as any different for Operations work? There is a reason systems administration is a skilled field, and a reason they're paid…

That high school kid needs to install a web server. Is he going to hire someone? No. He's going to copy a curl command.

Re: The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers

#242

Post by kungfudevops »

nvarsj wrote: post #123
duggan wrote: post #99

The contract between operations and dev (as concepts, not as people) is in need of renewal. To my mind, that was what "devops" was supposed to be, but it's been a bit of a dogpile in the years since the term gained popularity. Systems are opaque to most developers, and many developers wish to make their software opaque to the system on which it runs. This is a failure on behalf of our entire profession, not any one g…

It would be nice to have a well known 'devops manifesto'. I google'd it and came across this: https://sites.google.com/a/jezhumble.net/devops-manifesto/ . Which I think is actually pretty decent - the emphasis on cross functional product teams, for instance. In my mind, that is largely what devops is about - team ownership of the entire product, which includes infrastructure. Instead of having a silo'd 'ops' team wri…

IMO here's the best "devops manifesto" out there:

https://github.com/chef/devops-kungfu

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DEToXsgrPc

Re: The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers

#243

Post by gnaritas »

tormeh wrote: post #205
wflann wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think, occasionally, it's a lot easier to grok a command through googling than reading the built-in help. A fair amount of built-in *nix documentation I have run across is mediocre or unhelpful.

Recursively searching through all files in the current folder (aka the normal use case for grep) is accomplished by using "grep -r". It's on line 270 in "man grep". And that assumes that you know what grep is at all. Would it have hurt so much to call grep "regexsearch" instead? Maybe -r could be the default?

Recursion is caused either by -R or -r on nearly all commands and is pretty standard, and r is virtually never the default on any command because that would be a bad idea. And yes, having to type regexsearch rather than grep would have been a bad idea; while grep isn't a great name it's far preferable to someone who types constantly. Search or find would have been better names, names need to be both short and descriptive on the command line, and short comes first.

Re: The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers

#244

Post by rspeer »

stephenr wrote: post #176
eropple wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never use man pages, to be honest, and I'm quite comfortable on a command line. Reading long-ish things in a terminal kind of sucks, for me, and even if I end up reading a man page in Chrome it's nicely formatted and has readable serif fonts and is easily scrolled with the trackpad on my laptop.

Your terminal doesn't scroll with wheel/trackpad?

The wheel or trackpad scrolls the terminal's scrollback, not the pager program that happens to be running in it.

(I can imagine some sort of hackery that determines if less or something is running and scrolls that, but it sounds like a huge mess. Is that actually what you're doing? Does it send keypresses? What if you're in a mode where those keypresses do something besides scrolling?)

Re: The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers

#245

Post by markbnj »

xofer wrote: post #215
markbnj wrote: post #209

I think the author is mixing up a few different topics. If you're going to blame container frameworks for people sharing software in insecure ways you might as well blame the fact that executables are portable between compatible systems. Might as well blame the fact that there's a network while you're at it. We run docker throughout our infrastructure, but it is a deployment and dependency management technology, not…

The article is not an attack of Docker, but the way it's being used by many.

>> This rant is about containers, prebuilt VMs, and the incredible mess they cause because their concept lacks notions of "trust" and "upgrades".

Oh, ok.

Re: The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers

#246

Post by falcolas »

acveilleux wrote: post #236
TeMPOraL wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't, but so aren't dozens or hundreds of other commands you encounter when working with the command line. I managed to memorize a few invocations of tar (I listed them in another comment) but, for instance, I very rarely create a new archive so I'm never sure what flag I need to use. Part of the problem is that each command line utility has its own flag language, and equivalent functions often have different let…

Frankly, if you're going to rely on a magic recipe from the web for production, you should absolutely document it locally and go through the process of understanding each commands. As a former sys admin, I did that all the time. Who the hell can remember how to convert an SSL certificate to load it into a Glassfish app server? Didn't mean I couldn't step through all commands and figure out why it did that before I lo…

I agree with this. Despite my familiarity with so many command line tools, I do forget invocations. And so I have a wiki page I share with my coworkers to share particularly useful (or correct) invocations of dangerous tools.

On a Unix based system, tar is just used so frequently and for so many purposes, that not understanding it feels a bit like working in a shop and not knowing how to use a roll of tape.

Re: The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers

#247

Post by juliangregorian »

shanemhansen wrote: post #186
juliangregorian wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, but this relies on CSS trickery. If you had navigated to a text URL this would not be a vector.

What's a text url? The only way I can see this not being a vector is if you browse with css (and javascript for good measure) turned off. Or use lynx.

A page of text? With Content-type: text? An example being a shell script?

Re: The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers

#248

Post by stephenr »

tormeh wrote: post #205
wflann wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think, occasionally, it's a lot easier to grok a command through googling than reading the built-in help. A fair amount of built-in *nix documentation I have run across is mediocre or unhelpful.

Recursively searching through all files in the current folder (aka the normal use case for grep) is accomplished by using "grep -r". It's on line 270 in "man grep". And that assumes that you know what grep is at all. Would it have hurt so much to call grep "regexsearch" instead? Maybe -r could be the default?

Use the built-in search.

Edit: the rest of my comment (somehow submitted to soon!)

    man grep

    /recurs

Re: The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers

#249

Post by Pxtl »

tormeh wrote: post #205
wflann wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think, occasionally, it's a lot easier to grok a command through googling than reading the built-in help. A fair amount of built-in *nix documentation I have run across is mediocre or unhelpful.

Recursively searching through all files in the current folder (aka the normal use case for grep) is accomplished by using "grep -r". It's on line 270 in "man grep". And that assumes that you know what grep is at all. Would it have hurt so much to call grep "regexsearch" instead? Maybe -r could be the default?

All the core unix tools have the problem of predating the vowel generation (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?VowelGeneration).

Re: The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers

#250

Post by lmm »

acveilleux wrote: post #227
sciurus wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also the installer is now signed via GPG. https://rvm.io/rvm/security

But then there's a circular dependency because the GPG key is retrieved by the bash script that is wget'd.

It doesn't have to be circular. The script is secured by HTTPS (and hopefully has the key embedded in the script itself?) which can then retrieve the installer and verify it using the key.
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