The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers • Hacker News Board

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

#421

Post by hysterix » Wed, Apr 22, 2015, 11:48 PM UTC

dba7dba wrote: post #343

tedivm wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is hardly a new problem- and in many ways, I'm not sure it's a problem at all compared to the company cultural issues brought up by skywhopper. Whether it's programming or system administration, you're always going to have new people getting excited about the sudden power they've learned. Being able to make computers do things opens up this whole new world, and when people find themselves in that world they may…

Amen to that. When I see some of the job desc in job postings for DevOps/Sysadmin, I wonder. Is there really someone out there will all the skills that are asked for?

Wanted:

3-5 years of linux system administration experience 3-5 years of windows 2000/2010 administration experience 3-5 years of networking level tcp/ip experience with custom protocols 3-5 years of c++ experience 3-5 years of .net experience 3-5 years of .....

I think more than half the job postings out there are created by entry/mid level hr persons who find similar job descriptions on other sites and copy paste requirements. This then has propagated into monster job descriptions you see now.

I noted this as well, for the pay these companies are offering, anyone with that level of experience they are asking for would laugh and move on. It's almost as if it's a trojan horse of a job post. Only those stupid enough to apply to a job post like that are the kinds of employees they are looking for.

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

#422

Post by Torgo » Wed, Apr 22, 2015, 11:59 PM UTC

vacri wrote: post #192

eropple wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Linux containers were already a thing, and don't need an entire copy of an OS ported around with them. Neither do Docker containers. You can build off scratch and put the literal bare minimum you need in it. I've done it a few different times. It's rarely done because the time and effort almost never makes up for the complexity and cost, but if your old-school sysadmins are scoffing it's on them.

Response to exactly that idea from one of these guys: "Why do you need docker to just build an executable?"

Deterministic builds. Isolating shitty build scripts from my system.

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

#423

Post by manicdee » Thu, Apr 23, 2015, 12:46 AM UTC

skratlo wrote: post #37

zenlot wrote: post #2

"Stack is the new term for "I have no idea what I'm actually using"." - this made my day!

Same for "framework" which is: I have no idea what I'm doing

Programming languages are for lazy people who don't like flipping switches to code aseembly by hand.

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

#424

Post by swills » Thu, Apr 23, 2015, 12:49 AM UTC

yoklov wrote: post #377

swills wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C++ does usually require a runtime.

C++'s runtime is small and ubiquitous. Depending on how the software is written (if it allows disabling exceptions and rtti), it might be the same size as C's runtime, which is practically (but not totally) nonexistant. I'm not an expert on Java, but my experience with it is that it's runtime is fairly huge and requires custom installation.

Which C++ runtime is ubiquitous? I can think of at least 3 C++ runtimes (MS, libstdc++, libc++).

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

#425

Post by SFjulie1 » Thu, Apr 23, 2015, 1:59 AM UTC

ascendantlogic wrote: post #407

jetpks wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's the sysadmin's responsibility to insist on production deployments What decade are you from? No startups are hiring sysadmins to do any kind of work anymore. They're hiring "dev-ops" people, which seems to mean "Amateur $popularLanguage developer that deployed on AWS this one time." That's the whole problem with the dev-ops ecosystem. None of these dev-ops people seem to have any ops experience.

> That's the whole problem with the dev-ops ecosystem. None of these dev-ops people seem to have any ops experience. Thanks for painting all of us that do "devops" with a wide brush. If you're a dev shall we enumerate all of the XSS and SQL injection holes you've added to products over your career?

well, XSS and SQL injection comes from my experience from "devops" kind of developer, claiming to code without wishing to learn the basics (complexity, DB, ....).

So well, tried, but troll does not work.

And startup are made by "devops" kind of business men that don't care about computing correctly cost vs price because it is so XXth century.

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

#426

Post by kjs3 » Thu, Apr 23, 2015, 2:40 AM UTC

admyral wrote: post #308

mauricemir wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never under stood why some many people are not ok with using the command line. A few years back we had an issue where a mysql script was over the limit for phpmyadmin - my fairly experienced colleague he was unaware that you could log into the cli and use mysql from the cli.

Command line is modern day voodoo. There are ton of commands, each with a specific use, each with own their specific incantation, which can mixed in extremely powerful ways. But my theory is the main reason people would prefer not use it, is that improper usage can be harmful and sometimes destructive. The same reason people prefer to use garbage collected and dynamically typed programming languages.

improper usage can be harmful and sometimes destructive.

It is merciful that GUI environments are immune to these deficiencies.

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

#427

Post by stephenr » Thu, Apr 23, 2015, 4:53 AM UTC

squar1sm wrote: post #361

stephenr wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't consider what you presented as the "normal" or "ok" way of doing things either, especially not on anything resembling a live (i.e. not development/sandbox) environment. A distro (or official vendor, or possibly a trusted third-party) repo of pre-built, signed packages would always be my first choice. If one of those isn't available, my next step would be to create a package for the tool in question, part o…

About "ok". You're right. I probably used a loaded word without context. I too use whatever default package repo, followed by "extras" or whatever is available. You described a sane and nice process. I guess my point is, at some point we are are assuming "many eyes" (the binaries might be built with the previously mentioned make;configure steps) unless you are auditing all sources which is unlikely. Especially unlike…

> I find it interesting that binary packages have existed for decades and yet `rpm etc` knowledge is rare

What makes you think the knowledge is rare? Among developers who actively target linux distributions I would imagine the opposite is true.

Even a number of the referenced curl|bash offenders are just using that as a "shortcut" to add their own apt/yum repos and calling apt-get/yum to install their binary package(s).

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

#428

Post by reitanqild » Thu, Apr 23, 2015, 5:15 AM UTC

teddyh wrote: post #391

reitanqild wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He seems to be way nicer and more professional than you..?

If by “nicer and more professional” you mean “super condescending”.

What? Only after two hours did he tell kylegordon that he (kylegordon) was cute.

And at that point kylegordon had earned it.

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

#429

Post by contingencies » Thu, Apr 23, 2015, 5:26 AM UTC

legulere wrote: post #239

blfr wrote: post #4

This bothers me as well. Even tasks as simple as adding a repository are now being "improved" with a curl | sudo bash style setup[1]. However, installing from source with make was (and remains) a mess. It may work if you're dedicated to maintaining one application and (part of) its stack. But even then it usually leads to out of date software and tracking versions by hand. Many people have this weird aversion to doin…

There's nothing wrong with curl | sudo bash style setups as long as it's over https and the certificate gets checked. The advantages are that it's easy and you can make it work on almost all unix-like systems out there. The only disadvantage is that you have one additional weak point: The server can get contaminated. Before you had to contaminate one of the many developer machines / build machines. The situation hasn…

There's nothing wrong with curl | sudo bash style setups as long as it's over https and the certificate gets checked.

Even assuming the URL's publisher is trustworthy (which is a poor assumption to make, ever), you forget SSL / HTTPS is broken, that the NSA has established MITM on the entire internet, that your installation process (which should be both versioned and repeatable) now has zero versioning and all the entropy of the network plus bonus entropy.

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

#430

Post by contingencies » Thu, Apr 23, 2015, 5:34 AM UTC

danielweber wrote: post #228

Khaine wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of this is self inflected. Go look up how you install snort or bro on centos. You have to either install from source, or install from a rpm from there website which may or may not have issues. This means you lose dependency management, and update management. Pure madness

Choose your method of death: 1. Run this totally opaque command which might DTRT, and might completely pwn your system. 2. Prepare for 4 hours of dependency hell.

Alternatively, learn Gentoo.