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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

#451

Post by fnord77 »

senko wrote: post #450
fnord77 wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 le…

my point is $20-30k/m for an AWS database can actually be a bargain

Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration

#452

Post by nextos »

kaladin-jasnah wrote: post #353
nextos wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NixOS.

I wouldn't recommend NixOS on servers. It is unstable and extremely difficult to use. It breaks way too much. I could have done so much more with the time I used to try and make NixOS work for me. The cost of getting it to work is not worth its benefits to me. When I wanted to set up NixOS, I wanted to use it to manage a bunch of NixOS virtual machines (so, nixops), and then run a couple of services. Here are a few p…

Have you tried GuixSD?

I run NixOS, but I recognize that user experiences might be very different depending on the packages you use. NixPkgs is huge, enormous. Some stuff is really well maintained, whereas other stuff isn't.

Furthermore, declarative systems make a difficulty tradeoff. Lots of stuff is much easier, but problems are sometimes harder to debug as there's an extra abstraction layer.

IMHO, these days the best distributions out there are either very simple imperative ones with binaries (Arch, Alpine, etc.) or Nix-like (NixOS and GuixSD). Getting experience in those two extremes is really valuable.

Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration

#453

Post by scooble »

joshstrange wrote: post #98

I don't know, abstraction is the name of the game and it makes my job 1000x easier. I have multiple servers running in my house that host everything from Plex to small little apps I've written, it all runs in containers and I couldn't be happier. Is being able to setup a Wordpress site with a script really something we should strive for? I've always been a fan on "standing on the shoulders of giants" and it's served…

‘Cattle’ always seems to imply spreading your infrastructure across multiple cloud services, and having infrastructure management tools etc.

I sometimes wonder whether we need another metaphor, something like a dairy cow, where you only have one, but when it fails you can shoot it and plug in another very quickly and simply (e.g. using a script).

Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration

#454

Post by kafkaIncarnate »

bamboozled wrote: post #375
kafkaIncarnate wrote: post #361

Earlier 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…

Born, raised, and never moved out of tornado alley. Work for a major university, our university wide "off-site" backups are a datacenter across the street except for critical student information that is encrypted cloud backed up. We understand fatalism with tornado sirens every 10am the first Tuesday of the month.

What I'm against isn't the cloud existing, it's your 24x7 uptime guarantee during the equivalent of Hurricane Katrina at the cost of over engineering.

If you're an engineer in that scenario, you're either running, helping clear debris, or giving first aid/supplies. Your computer is nonsense at that point and yes it's a sign of a problem if you are clinging onto your devices in such a disaster scenario.

EDIT: Just re-read, I might have gotten you confused with someone on a different thread entirely about Kubernetes... Maybe I typed on the wrong tab, oops. Your comment is about data not uptime.

Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration

#455

Post by BrandoElFollito »

kilroy123 wrote: post #431
BrandoElFollito wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Wow that's something I never really considered before. I think the documentation would be a good first start. Maybe some kind of script(s) that could be run that just do all the de-automation?

My plan is to have a technical documentation on how to tear down the installations that are "smart" to use "normal" stuff.

Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration

#456

Post by nix23 »

southerntofu wrote: post #420
nix23 wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You misread something, it's 2022 and we discover that mainframes can be cheaper then a AWS-cloud-machine-park ;)

I thought AWS was the mainframe in the parent comment?!

Please educate yourself what a mainframe is.

Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration

#457

Post by encryptluks2 »

chasil wrote: post #267
encryptluks2 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> -"As a practical goal, you should be able to recreate your host with a single Bash script." I disagree with this. A single bash script configuring an entire hosts can be overly complex and very difficult to follow. As someone who has created complex bash scripts, this will become very time consuming and prevent you from making many changes without significant efforts. I'd suggest familiarizing yourself with tools l…

"Relax and Recover" (rear) is a useful tool, written specifically in the bash dialect, that will write a compressed clone of your system to a bootable USB flash drive, network share (NFS/SMB), and other targets. Booting with rear, a (somewhat "klunky") interface will allow you to restore your captured backup, apparently pristine. It is similar in effect to the HP-UX Ignite tool that I used on that platform. Oracle ha…

Yes, but capturing something is far different than being able to reproduce a system across multiple machines.

Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration

#458

Post by bmurphy1976 »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #124
bmurphy1976 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need a 42u rack. You can run a cluster of Raspberry Pi's hidden in your basement ceiling rafters like me.

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.

What makes you think cable management for a bunch of Raspberry Pi's is any more difficult than cable management for a large rack?

Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration

#459

Post by notyourday »

chasil wrote: post #230
notyourday wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Android doesn't allow GPL code in userland, and the installed base is massive. You aren't administering Android devices. Stop obsessing about writing portable scripts. Write scripts for the targets that you are going to run them on.

I run Lineage, and use a number of scripts. Stop ignoring standards. They exist for important reasons. Invent your existentialism in some other realm.

> I run Lineage, and use a number of scripts.

There are people who dig trenches with spoons. It is not efficient and no one sane would be accounting for them.

> Stop ignoring standards. They exist for important reasons.

No.

> Invent your existentialism in some other realm.

I do. My target is Linux servers. Look at the topic : Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration" not "Finding another inefficient way to administer a phone"

Re: Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration

#460

Post by notyourday »

MonaroVXR wrote: post #287
notyourday wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not following, sorry. This is cattle: * PXE boot server(s) * Image contains masterless puppet bootstrap. * Server(s) asks git - "give me the bootstrap for my mac address" * Server(s) gets a list of classes to apply. * Server(s) applies classes. Done.

What kind of software do you use to configure PXE servers? Or is there anything else that I'm missing? I'm looking for a solution to make unattend installation possible. Edit: Can use Ansible to make a PXE server. (Egg or chicken thing)

There's a single pxeboot server that bootstraps everything. It sends back a single image common among all baremetal servers regardless of what asks for it. The actual configuration is done via a git repo that contains a mapping between mac address of a server and puppet classes.
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