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The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers

vitavonni.de

291–300 of 466 posts

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

#291
post #226

70s system software is really showing its age. Containers are just a hack to make its complexity sometimes easier to manage.

Emperor Joseph II: My dear young man, don't take it too hard. Your work is ingenious. It's quality work. And there are simply too many notes, that's all. Just cut a few and it will be perfect.

Mozart: Which few did you have in mind, Majesty?

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

#292
I don't think any experienced organization is going to just download containers off the internet to use on their servers. Which is why there is self-hosted Registry applications that corps and big companies buy to host their own, where they build their images to support their applications and that are vetted through traditional corp policy

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

#293
post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> No one can tell you how to build hadoop? Well, figure it out. I get the impression that several people working on debian couldn't work this one out!

Surely at minimum Hadoop developers could tell you!

Have you even been in a project where the developers didn't know how to build it? It's a strange situation, with huge environments being passed from one computer to another, and treasured with more care than the code itself.

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

#294

System administration is as important as ever. Docker and other containers just simplify system administration across many different machines. The standard Unix user land tools are excellent and very flexible, but they are fucking god awful at configuration management. Docker solves the problem of "how do I make sure I have the same versions and configurations of everything on all 500 of my compute nodes without havi…

Many places are rolling this type of sysadmin work up into DevOps. This scares graybeard sysadmins, because they see DevOps automating them out of a job.

Nope, not really. just wait till you move to a new job, and you inherit a docker/rockit/etc system. You need to patch openssl/glibc/etc however, half the containers are built with an old build system that's been replaced. You've got 15 containers based on fedora20 which is EOL, one of your apps relies on a bug in fedora21 which is also EOL.

Oh yeah, its just you, you have no resources, and you're on call to fix it when it fails (yeah devops is a nice way of saying unpaid overtime)

Oh and you need to replace two of three physical hosts, but you can't hot migrate containers, and you loose quorum on your cluster if you take one of the hosts down.

Looks its as simple as this. I'm a sysadmin, I know I know, you think I can't code, you think I know nothing about programming. This is bollocks. Two things: One I've seen this all before. Containers? yeah thats just fancy batch processing. Two, you know how when ever you log in to a new machine and all your files are there, not only that its faster than your laptop? thats me, making things fast. Its my job.

DevOps is a step up Not really, it seems to be a way of getting devs to do out of hours. Or allowing people with no experience of programming doing programming, or no experience of infrastructure doing infrastructure. A decent system admin does all of the "devop" things already. If they don't have a build system, git/svn controlled config management, they they arn't real sysadmins, they are over reaching helpdesk monkies.

fucking god awful at configuration management

dunno what you've been using, but I can configure 5000 machines inside 15 minutes with 10 lines of code and one ssh command.

A few years ago, you would have functional silos Only in certain companies. If you have politics, you'll get silos.

Docker/Maven/etc. are the abstraction layer between the teams

can't use technology to overcome procedural problems. If your teams arn't talking, your infrastructure is going to be shit. If your teams don't think about others when they produce their products, then things will fall through the cracks.

An example, Say you want 10 VMs of x size. If you have a coheesive system, you could email/phone/talk to a guy and you'll have some machines. If your provisioning team had thought ahead they'll have made an API that spins up machines, ties them to your accounting code, and configured them to your environment. That's not technology, that just good practice.

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

#295

I agree that many of these convenient setups are embarrassingly sloppy, but it's the sysadmin's responsibility to insist on production deployments being far more rigorous. No one can tell you how to build hadoop? Well, figure it out. Random Docker containers being downloaded? Use a local Docker repo with vetted containers and Dockerfiles only. I don't even allow vendor installers to run on my production systems. My e…

I think more disconcerting is the rise of "sysadmins" who think they're qualified sysadmins because they know how to bash and docker.

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

#296
I'm a bit puzzled. Let's say I decide to not download the binary but build it from source. Unless I actually read the source, I'm trusting the community to have read it, which consists of other people thinking I have read it.

In my view, this is true for the OS itself. So unless I read everything, I'm fucked. And I don't. Thus I'm fucked.

Do I miss something?

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

#297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely at minimum Hadoop developers could tell you!

Have you even been in a project where the developers didn't know how to build it? It's a strange situation, with huge environments being passed from one computer to another, and treasured with more care than the code itself.

This happened to me about a decade ago. A very smart sysadmin in the company created an acronis image for machine deployments. They very carefully documented everything they changed, and how to recreate it. Then someone else created an image from one of the imaged machines without documenting what they changed. This happened a couple dozen or so times until the image pretty much was a mess of hand installed binaries, configuration hacks, etc. It literally took another person 6 months to untwist what was actually on the machine by md5suming the crap out of everything guessing at versions until they found a match, and documenting it.

That sounds like the state of a lot of docker images.

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

#298
post #244

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?)

No I'm talking about scrolling in the actual program running - it's most useful in a pager obviously, but it also works for editors, and it works both locally (OS X, built-in Terminal.app) and over SSH on Debian hosts.

I'll be honest - I have ~no idea~ (edit: apparently there are xterm control sequences for mouse scrolling) how it's actually implemented, but several tools have some reference to mouse support (tmux, vim, etc) in option/config files, so it's probably available for your distro/platform and just needs to be enabled.

Further edit: (or PS. or whatever):

`less` pager supports mouse scrolling. `more` pager does not!

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

#299
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the same by any measure. When you read the script in a browser, than pastes it in a terminal, you know that "scp -r ~/.ssh u@somehost.com" isn' there.

No, you don't: http://thejh.net/misc/website-terminal-copy-paste

Fair point.

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

#300
post #269

I agree that many of these convenient setups are embarrassingly sloppy, but it's the sysadmin's responsibility to insist on production deployments being far more rigorous. No one can tell you how to build hadoop? Well, figure it out. Random Docker containers being downloaded? Use a local Docker repo with vetted containers and Dockerfiles only. I don't even allow vendor installers to run on my production systems. My e…

>> No one can tell you how to build hadoop? Well, figure it out. I get the impression that several people working on debian couldn't work this one out!

Hadoop is insane. The elephant is fitting. Is it really the best choice, or has someone done something cleaner in golang or c++11?
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