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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

#281

Post by the8472 »

eranation wrote: post #252

As a Java / Hadoop / Spark / Scala fan, all I can say is, it's a little embarrassing, not sure how the Java ecosystem around hadoop became so sloppy (I witness it first hand on a daily basis). I wish more people who are concerned with security / ease of build would turn into contributing to maven, sbt, ivy and the hadoop project. Instead of hating the Java ecosystem, why not join it and make it better? Hadoop is ubiq…

I for one like java/scala but am quite wary of maven&co.

All I need is a build tool. I can download a bunch of jar dependencies myself if needed. In the "old days" we just put them into the CVS repository or in a tarball to download along with the source and an ant script to build the whole thing.

Granted, this did lead to outdated libraries at times and thus potentially was a security threat in itself. But at least it didn't roll the concerns of obtaining dependencies and building into a single tool. Often it's nice to just get the dependencies and build the project your own way, e.g. in your IDE of choice. Or vice versa, obtain the depdencies on your own (e.g. plugging in a different version than recommended) and then use the automated build.

I think those things should be provided by separate, simple tools.

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

#282

Post by c22 »

rspeer wrote: post #244
stephenr wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?)

I just tried this on debian and my mouse wheel scrolls less inside of my terminal (and returns my previous line buffer when I type 'q').

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

#284

Post by devy »

The 'curl | sudo bash' mention reminds me of OS X Homebrew. The one-liner installation script is still published in the home page front and center (though it's running from a trusted source Github).

http://brew.sh/

One might argue that that easy of oneliner installer script is exactly what make Homebrew gains popularity. And dev machine is different from production environment in terms installation packages. Still, I agree that proper container management in local network and perhaps new security features from upstream container vendors would help the situation.

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

#285

Post by c22 »

eropple wrote: post #162
stephenr wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that anyone who is reasonably comfortable in a command line would resort to `man command`, `command --help` or `command -h` before googling for usage.

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.

I probably haven't read a man page "cover to cover" since high school. Usually I just need to read a couple lines about a specific flag or the location of some configuration file which I can find quickly with a simple search or by scanning the document with my eyes.

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

#286

Post by bd_at_rivenhill »

sltkr wrote: post #87
pjc50 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maintaining autoconf/automake stuff is a pain. Using it is usually as simple as "configure;make;make install". It doesn't do dependency management though, which is an externalised cost. But that's what rpm/deb do. I see the attraction of containers and disk image based management. It's much less time consuming. But it's very much the opposite of ISO9001-style input traceability.

> Using it is usually as simple as "configure;make;make install". "Usually" indeed. Because if it breaks, you do need to know the implementation details to figure out what's wrong.

My experience is that "configure;make;make install" has a much higher probability of success (>95% regardless of whether you are running the most up-to-date version of the OS) than something like cmake (which seems to hover around 60% if you try to build on slightly older systems).

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

#287

Post by Retra »

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?

If it were up to me it would be called `find` and it would have flags to find files or text within files.

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

#288

Post by c22 »

juliangregorian wrote: post #247
shanemhansen wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Do you think the average user copying and pasting administrative commands into their shell will stop to check the content encoding of the document they are copying from? Do you trust your browser not to try rendering an ill-defined document with an ambiguous extension?

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

#289

Post by c22 »

sshconnection wrote: post #241
Twirrim wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's probably okay for him.

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

#290

Post by recursive »

juliangregorian wrote: post #247
shanemhansen wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Do you check the Content-type: header of the response for text/plain before copying? If you do, you'd be in the minority.
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