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Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration

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Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration

#401

Post by theK »

BrandoElFollito wrote: post #394
lrvick wrote: post #61

I have over 20 years of Linux/FreeBSD sysadmin experience ranging from universities to major silicon valley companies in both cloud and on-prem. When it comes to companies I mostly support cloud these days but when it comes to me and my family I accept every downside and host as almost all of our digital lives in a 42u rack in a gutted closet in our house with static IPs and business fiber. I know where our data live…

Same here. There is, at least for me, one big serious downside: what happens when I die. My wife is quite concerned about her being left with a web of home automation, hosted emails etc. I understand her and I am trying to find a way out. My current idea is to document how to de-automatize the home and how to deal with emails and fiber access (the main things to worry about). Any ideas are very much welcome

Am at the same point. Have been thinking about a variety of options 1. bidirectional pacts with self-hosting friend 2. creating a network and culture of self hosting techies that develop the skills to assist (money and documentation required here but more resilient than no 1) 3. investing in your kids.

Technically option 3 should be the best since it also engineers around generations (options 1 and 2 would roughly be locked to a narrower age group). But it also can be a double edge sword, what if they don’t like tech? Or if you overdo it with trying to make them interested in tech and self hosting and it backfires?

So yeah, no real solution yet. But I’d subscribe to that newsletter if there was one

Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration

#402

Post by tpetry »

belter wrote: post #157
c2h5oh wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember how surprised people were when I demoed a $200/month bare metal server outperforming by a huge margin RDS MySQL instance that they were paying something upwards of 16k/month. IIRC we ended up using it as a disposable replica for some non-real time but heavy operations.

Not a fair comparison and you know it. Now add to the $200 month bare metal server, the yearly salary of the 3 admins you need to manage it. One as backup, one for day time, one for the night plus a weekend rotation. Add to the admin salaries social security, insurance and a margin of safety if one is unavailable due to sickness.

The cloud is no magic place. You need the same people for your cloud infrastructure. Sure you don‘t have a bare metal server failing but you can replace that with a lot of AWS infrastructure glue which could fail too.

Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration

#403

Post by nix23 »

tpetry wrote: post #400
akireu wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's 2022 and we're about to rediscover something we know for 40 years already: mainframes are freaking expensive.

It's 2022 and we're about to rediscover something we know for 40 years already: mainframes have freaking performance.

>mainframes have freaking performance

Yes and no, really depends for what workloads. But freaking reliability that's for sure.

Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration

#404

Post by trabant00 »

Nextgrid wrote: post #90
trabant00 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been hearing this for the past 20 years. And now my sysadmin skills are more and more in demand. For the past 5 years or so I started making more money than a dev because of supply and demand. Rent to AWS actually drives demand up quite a lot since the bills are huge and very few people understand what is under the hood and how it can be optimized. I doubt very much things will change in the near future. In the…

Out of curiosity, how do you find old-school sysadmin gigs? I find that everything nowadays requires knowing the specifics of a particular cloud and their managed services as opposed to raw Linux or networking knowledge.

There are few to none outright old-school sysadmin gigs. You have to know the cloud providers specifics. Also everything about containers. And Go.

But once you get through the door at a new job the massive difference between somebody who understands what is under the hood and somebody who just got an AWS certification with no prior knowlwdge becomes apparent to all. Quick position and paycheck raises follow.

Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration

#405

Post by 2Gkashmiri »

e-dt wrote: post #391
2Gkashmiri wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

curious that the souce metions MIT license at top but in the bottom it says "2. Don't use our resources for closed source projects"; was that intentional? my current understanding of MIT license is a "do anything, i don't care, just don't blame me". if i were you and wanted to use "dont use our resources" part, i would set it as AGPL or even SSPL if you are brave enough.

There's a difference between what you are allowed to do with the code, which is what the MIT license covers, and what you are allowed to do with a specific hosted platform on which the code is running, which is what that term is part of.

oh. Do... you need to specify another license for that? this is interesting.

Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration

#406

Post by trabant00 »

lambdaba wrote: post #242
trabant00 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been hearing this for the past 20 years. And now my sysadmin skills are more and more in demand. For the past 5 years or so I started making more money than a dev because of supply and demand. Rent to AWS actually drives demand up quite a lot since the bills are huge and very few people understand what is under the hood and how it can be optimized. I doubt very much things will change in the near future. In the…

Hey I'm super interested in such sysadmin work if you could describe it here or share it on another channel (email in bio). Many thanks.

What exactly are you interested in finding out? What I do every day? How you can find such work? Or?

Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration

#407

Post by tpetry »

rr808 wrote: post #302
akira2501 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's when it clicked for me.. comparing my hourly salary rate vs. the cost of running these services "in the cloud." Entirely eliminating "system administration" from my duties was absolutely a net win for me and our team.

To me System administration is much simpler than cloud administration. Especially for security, I'm never confident cloud applications are fully secure.

That‘s true! And everyone reading it here is a startup idea: Analyze a cloud infrastructure and report which has access to what, combine that with a simple DSL so i can say that IAM x is only alloweed read-only access to some service. Find ways to break those configured security settings.

If on a test run or onboarding this application will find just one security hole (e.g. public s3 bucket) you will have the customer lifetime because he‘s afraid he will make a mistake again.

Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration

#408

Post by tpetry »

ihateolives wrote: post #349
Ku_las33 wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> (it's written in Golang) That means no memory related security bugs, which is a huge plus.

Not really. JVM is similar in this regard and one of the thing we wrote in our basic Java course was the code that produces memory leak. And when you have memory leak you also may end up with other fun things like applications behaving unexpectedly in low memory conditions.

That‘s a really weak argument. You can build memory leaks in every language and at some point your application will have a problem.

Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration

#409

Post by denton-scratch »

lrvick wrote: post #61

I have over 20 years of Linux/FreeBSD sysadmin experience ranging from universities to major silicon valley companies in both cloud and on-prem. When it comes to companies I mostly support cloud these days but when it comes to me and my family I accept every downside and host as almost all of our digital lives in a 42u rack in a gutted closet in our house with static IPs and business fiber. I know where our data live…

You have a 42U rack to accomodate your family's home-computing needs? How large is your family?

Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration

#410

Post by js4ever »

unity1001 wrote: post #357
Lamad123 wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How good is their 50 euro package? I wanna try it just for fun and dicking around.

Hetzner is pretty good in general. $70/month gets you a 16 vcpu VM with 2TB free egress/month. Their additional egress pricing is peanuts compared to Google. Google, AWS etc egress is so overpriced - as if we are still living in mid 2000s.

20 TB free egress, not 2TB, and additional TB is 1€/TB
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