So I like this article and want to learn more about sys admin/dev ops/whatever but where do I go. Is docker bad? What is a good starting point? What are best practices?
The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers
461–466 of 466 posts
Re: The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers
#462This 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 But even then it usually leads to out of date software and tracking versions by hand.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…
I'm guilty of using this method in my side project (https://github.com/grn/bash-ctx). My goal was to solve the installation problem quickly. I absolutely would love to offer proper installation methods. However my experience with building *.deb packages makes me think that it's not something that I'd like to do (especially it's a side project).
The question, therefore, is: what is the simplest alternative installation method for OS X and Linux?
Re: The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers
#463Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that in this scenario, the GPG key and signature serves no practical purpose. The whole security, whether GPG is invoked or not, relies on the security of the HTTPS connection alone. If the HTTPS cannot be trusted alone, then everything is lost as a compromised HTTPS connection can be used supply both a comprimised GPG key and a compromised package, or, indeed, anything at all that is legal to `| sudo…
It gives people a way to choose the level of security they care about. Those who are willing to trust HTTPS can trust HTTPS. Those who aren't can obtain the GPG key and check its signature by another mechanism (WoT) and manually verify the package signature.
Those who would go out of their way to do the GPG check are also the same people who are horrified by `curl .... | sudo bash`
Re: The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers
#464Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's just automated copy-pasting of commands you don't understand from the internet, which is something everyone who runs Linux (and is not a wizard) does all the time. It's really really bad, but people will continue doing it until commands/things become so easy we can actually understand what we're doing. Unfortunately, this has never been a priority in Unix-land as far as I've gathered.
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.
some man pages are really obscure though. i am thinking of policy kit and find which can be as long and as arid.
Re: The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers
#465Earlier quoted context omitted.
It gives people a way to choose the level of security they care about. Those who are willing to trust HTTPS can trust HTTPS. Those who aren't can obtain the GPG key and check its signature by another mechanism (WoT) and manually verify the package signature.
Those who would go out of their way to do the GPG check are also the same people who are horrified by `curl .... | sudo bash`
Yes, that's the point. Those who aren't horrified can do that. Those who are can get the package "by hand" and do the GPG check themselves.
Re: The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers
#466Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the reason why all these standalone things bundle everything into their installation process. The problem is installing 206 different pythons on my system just makes it more likely that something else is going to break.
… which is one of the pressures driving Docker adoption. Each process tree gets its own root filesystem to trash with its multitude of dependencies. DLL hell, shared library hell, JDK hell, Ruby and Python environment hell… a lot of it can be summed up as "userland hell". Docker makes it easy to give the process its own bloody userland and be done with it.
I think this falls under the heading of "I'm old", but I already have one machine to maintain. Replacing it with N machines to maintain doesn't feel like a win to me.