Remember that time where the server's command line felt like a mysterious adventure not unlike delving into a dungeon with just a torch and a short sword?
that is beautifully said
Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration
441–450 of 485 posts
Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration
#442Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I think this is valid in many cases. A decent sysadmin in the US is (speculating) 200K USD, a good one in Europe is 120K+ euro. You have cheaper but they probably can't explaint a UDP datagram or know how ECMP over BGP works. It's the understanding of all of the underling tech which make them worth there weight in gold.
I can't tell you how ECMP over BGP works and I was an SRE at Google. Your idea of what's needed to run Linux servers is well over the top.
Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration
#443Earlier quoted context omitted.
Snapshots every 4 hours? That doesn't sound impressive at all. In 2022 that's laptop tier capability.
Well my dev laptop could run 1000x more traffic than what I need on my servers. But of course I am running build tools and bunch of other dev tools locally that are not even installed on our servers.
I'm not talking about traffic I'm just talking about expectations as far as software capabilities.
Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration
#444Earlier quoted context omitted.
> when it comes to me and my family I Who will keep maintaining your infra when you die, say you get hit by the infamous bus later today?
I can't answer for OP. But I don't think that the situation would be any better if the services are hosted in the cloud. Stuff needs to be maintained either way.
Not full services like Gmail pCloud etc... Non-tech people can keep using those services and can access tech support even if OP is no longer available.
Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration
#445Earlier quoted context omitted.
What’s the worst that can realistically happen?
If you don't have another provider option, you stand to lose Internet as a utility for your residence, which many would consider a pretty poor situation.
Has that ever happened in practice? I find it very hard to believe that a company normally so desperate for new business as to spam people with sales calls and lock people into contracts (to make sure they can't leave once the service ends up being sub-par) would suddenly start saying no to people's money and cutting them off based on a technicality.
Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration
#446Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm too busy to tend to the care and feeding of a database server. I'll gladly pay amazon to do it for me.
Typical statement from someone that doesn’t actually pay the bill (a.k.a a software engineer in most companies). It’s easy to trivialize $20-30k a month when it’s someone else’s money and it’s less work for you.
When considering the cost of having a secure server room, a commercial internet line, electricity, cooling and hardware - plus the cost of my time (or someone else's on the team), AWS gets more and more attractive. The business side paying the bill agrees fully.
People on my time would rather be developing software than doing sys admin stuff
Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration
#447Earlier quoted context omitted.
Racks are not that expensive, and are a very good way to keep things connected, powered, accessible and tidy. Heaps of Pis in rafters will quickly turn into a cable spaghetti hell tied into ugly knots.
I agree, when you get to a larger scale. 3-5 RPi's won't make to much spaghetti.
Even for that I'd get a 8-12U box and connect everything using cable organizers and a patch panel.
Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration
#448Earlier quoted context omitted.
If there's a local disaster that wipes out your office and your friends and all you can think about is data then you should ask a professional to screen you for sociopathy and whether you have any treatable mental illness. No shame in it, I myself have one, but you shouldn't be concerned with this scenario even if it happens. Life is too short to waste on ruining your life over planning on how to ruin your life even…
> If there's a local disaster that wipes out your office and your friends and all you can think about is data then you should ask a professional to screen you for sociopathy and whether you have any treatable mental illness. So you'd lose your friends and potentially your livelihood and any ability to financial support yourself, or any surviving friends or family, just because you don't want to use cloud backups or a…
How many times have you known this to happen?
And how are you currently preparing your company against a solar flare?
Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration
#449As a solo bootstrapped SaaS founder who literally relies on my app staying online to pay my rent and food, I chose NOT to use the cloud, even though I have 6 figures in cloud credits. I use the credit to spin up a single beefy baremetal instance and manage my own services. It's because I realized the cloud was based on a false promise which seemed possible a few years ago, but I now realized is impossible. There is n…
You really tell this story well. I could never voice my frustrations with cloud that I've had diving back into code lately. But you nail it - it's a time suck that really is a different Cloud DevOps (tm) skill set. Literal moment of personal clarity for me rn (however obvious this may be for the outside world and how dumb it might make me look). Seriously, thank you!
Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration
#450Earlier quoted context omitted.
Typical statement from someone that doesn’t actually pay the bill (a.k.a a software engineer in most companies). It’s easy to trivialize $20-30k a month when it’s someone else’s money and it’s less work for you.
When considering the cost of having a secure server room, a commercial internet line, electricity, cooling and hardware - plus the cost of my time (or someone else's on the team), AWS gets more and more attractive. The business side paying the bill agrees fully. People on my time would rather be developing software than doing sys admin stuff
There is a continuum between "I run servers in my basement" and "I pay mid 5 figures monthly to have autoscaled autofailover hotstandby 1s-interval backed up cluster across three AZs".
I use AWS, DO and Hetzner (bare metal) for (different) cases where each makes sense.
In the past few years, maintenance burden and uptime between AWS and Hetzner hosted stuff was comparable, with the cost being an order of magnitude less for Hetzner (as an added benefit, that machine is more beefy but I wasn't even comparing that).
> People on my time would rather be developing software than doing sys admin stuff.
I am not surprised software developers would prefer doing software development :-)