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Old school Linux administration – my next homelab generation

scholz.ruhr

11–20 of 115 posts

Re: Old school Linux administration – my next homelab generation

#11
It's absolutely fine and I'd argue essential to know Linux system administration even for people who mostly work in the cloud. From my recent experience sys admin skills seem to be a lost art - people no longer have to care about the underpinnings of a Linux system and when problems hit it shows.

It's interesting from a job market standpoint how little incentive there is to learn the basics when more and more we are seeing developers being made responsible for ops and admin tasks.

Re: Old school Linux administration – my next homelab generation

#13

Honestly, it sounds more as if author is just not experienced enough to reap the rewards of containers/IaaC. Having some servers as pets is fine for time being, but after being used to the cattle little pesky issues & upkeep starts to annoy more and more and you either give up on it and leave neglected or slowly build up most of the infra you ran away from in the first place.

It depends on your software selection. I run machines than i do updates on twice a year and thats all the maintenance they need. Less than a person-day per year!

Re: Old school Linux administration – my next homelab generation

#14
post #7

Once you work in enterprise IDC, setting up home labs is nothing but a liability. Unwanted stuff like UPS, cooling and more bills. I have one Intel NUC running FreeBSD 13 (dual SSD with 32 GB ram and Intel i7 CPU 8th GEN) with one jail and VM. It acts as a backup server for my Ubuntu laptop and MacBook pro. Nightly I dump data to cloud providers for offsite reasons. Finally, I set LXD, Docker and KVM on my Ubuntu dev…

You’re still doing a lot of home serving/IT there.

I take your point and generally agree. Leave the major hardware to the actual data centers. Stuff at home should be either resume driven or very efficient.

Re: Old school Linux administration – my next homelab generation

#15

Honestly, it sounds more as if author is just not experienced enough to reap the rewards of containers/IaaC. Having some servers as pets is fine for time being, but after being used to the cattle little pesky issues & upkeep starts to annoy more and more and you either give up on it and leave neglected or slowly build up most of the infra you ran away from in the first place.

It depends on your software selection. I run machines than i do updates on twice a year and thats all the maintenance they need. Less than a person-day per year!

You're right, I might've extrapolated my usage/experience onto the author accidentally, maybe his use case is indeed different.

I still don't know why you wouldn't use containers though, even if you dislike Docker, something like LXC makes everything oh-so neater.

Re: Old school Linux administration – my next homelab generation

#16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on your software selection. I run machines than i do updates on twice a year and thats all the maintenance they need. Less than a person-day per year!

You're right, I might've extrapolated my usage/experience onto the author accidentally, maybe his use case is indeed different. I still don't know why you wouldn't use containers though, even if you dislike Docker, something like LXC makes everything oh-so neater.

I tried both Docker and Bubblewrap. Containers help with managing dependency creep, but if you avoid that in the first place, you don't need containers.

Re: Old school Linux administration – my next homelab generation

#18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, I might've extrapolated my usage/experience onto the author accidentally, maybe his use case is indeed different. I still don't know why you wouldn't use containers though, even if you dislike Docker, something like LXC makes everything oh-so neater.

I tried both Docker and Bubblewrap. Containers help with managing dependency creep, but if you avoid that in the first place, you don't need containers.

If you only run your own software and are conscious about your dependencies, then dependency creep is gonna be less of an issue, but don't forget that your dependencies often bring theirs too. And third-party software is very often much less mindful of it.

But even besides dependency creep, containers simplify your software env, simplify backups, migrations, permissions(although container are not replacement for secure isolation), file system access, network routing etc,etc,etc.

Re: Old school Linux administration – my next homelab generation

#19

It's absolutely fine and I'd argue essential to know Linux system administration even for people who mostly work in the cloud. From my recent experience sys admin skills seem to be a lost art - people no longer have to care about the underpinnings of a Linux system and when problems hit it shows. It's interesting from a job market standpoint how little incentive there is to learn the basics when more and more we are…

I see this in my firm. Non-IT management loves to resort to the lowest denominator of 'systems', that is - systems built by people who are not trained as administrators nor experienced, but mainly follow online guides /and deliver/ (at p50). When I mention the resilience of the systems we maintain to senior directors the most common reply is that 1. the activities are not production and 2. the cost of letting our proper IT-departments handle things go way beyond the willingness to pay. When I reply that our non-production activities are still unmissable for anything more than a few days (which defines it as production for me, but not in our IT-risk landscape) I usually get greeted with something along the lines that in all things cloud all is different. For non-techies I think it's just hard to phantom that most of the effort in maintaining systems is in resilience, not in the just scripting it to work repeatedly.

Re: Old school Linux administration – my next homelab generation

#20
post #17

I think this is to oldscool. You can still automate via Ansible, keep your playbooks and roles in Git and run VM's.

Exactly this. I have a big nostalgia for old school sysadmin ways of working, but just use Ansible. It’s beyond easy and can be as simple or complex as you like. I use containers on my home server (with podman) alongside a bunch of other services and it’s all just so clean and easy to maintain as a collection of roles and playbooks.
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