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The Lost Art of System Administration

matt-rickard.com

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Re: The Lost Art of System Administration

#51

Post by Gordonjcp »

GauntletWizard wrote: post #32
unboxingelf wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing kubernetes to a sysadmin manually provisioning a LAMP stack is like comparing a home kitchen to commercial factory. They can both make a pizza, but one can make an order of magnitude more - at same time. They’re solving two different problems.

I'm a dude who uses Kubernetes to make pizzas. Kubeternetes is absolutely a commercial bakery class machine, but much of it's adoption is due to the fact that for just a bit more in price and effort, you can have that class of machine in your home and run real things on it. Seriously: I run clusters from a few dozen nodes (down from a few hundred at my peak, sigh) down to a trio of Raspberry Pis in my living room. Th…

I'd say Kubernetes was more like having a lathe in your shed. Almost no-one needs one but it sure does make some projects a lot easier.

Re: The Lost Art of System Administration

#52

Post by Gordonjcp »

Syonyk wrote: post #26
keyle wrote: post #8

I grew up with spectrums and ms-dos with a turbo and a reset button. I feel sad for my kids who will grow up with iPads and Windows 14 PCs with not the slightest clue on how things are running and the OS shielding them from crashing the thing or running viruses for fun. Same things for young lads that come out of university today with their degrees. They're well spoken and can recite algo theory like nothing but stil…

> Have we reached that level of the civilisation that goes extinct, for forgetting how its own inner machines work? Probably. Almost nobody under the age of 40 works in the "deep weeds" anymore (firmware, kernel, casually "Ring 0 and below" spaces). A decade ago, it was about 30. I'm the last wave, it seems, of people in these spaces, and that's quite terrifying. But I get it. The hardware is maddeningly complex, rap…

> Almost nobody under the age of 40 works in the "deep weeds" anymore (firmware, kernel, casually "Ring 0 and below" spaces).

On PCs, maybe, but "kids these days" use microcontrollers like I used meccano parts.

Re: The Lost Art of System Administration

#53

Post by bloopernova »

It's not lost, it just evolved.

I've been a Linux sysadmin from the late 90s through to the mid/late 2010s, now I'm doing DevOps. My sysadmin-spidey-sense has helped me to solve so many issues, and my foundation of knowledge in systems/networking/etc helps me design better code and infrastructure.

Re: The Lost Art of System Administration

#54

Post by Gordonjcp »

eating555 wrote: post #46

This is pretty much why we we call Arch Linux the "Glorious Arch". It's not only a daily machine or a server. It's Art!

It would be nice if there was a "more stable" version rather than "newest all the time no matter what".

I switched from Arch to Ubuntu because they shipped a broken avr-gcc despite upstream GCC saying "roll it all back, guys", because it was the newest version. Doesn't matter that it produced deeply faulty output, newest is best!

Re: The Lost Art of System Administration

#55

Post by Gordonjcp »

> Init systems and daemons have been replaced by single-process containers. General-purpose operating systems have been replaced with small (e.g., alpine) or even smaller ones (e.g., microkernels).

Valves have been replaced by transistors, transistors have been replaced by integrated circuits.

Re: The Lost Art of System Administration

#56

Post by blacklion »

Somebody needs to choose version of k8s, underlying Linux kernel, system options for this kernel, etc. It is still THE THING, if you try to earn some money and don't have VC money to burn before Google buy you.

For example, in place where I work (as developer) operations found good combination of kernel, driver version, NIC chip revision and sysctls, which allows us to use 20% less hardware for our typical load (or allow us to serve 20% more clients on existing hardware without buying new one), and it is substantial for us.

Yes, I, as developer, don't need to be system administrator, for me it is containers and CI and automatic deployment, infra as a code, and all this stuff.

But somebody NEEDS to build & support this infra. And change faulted SSDs.

Re: The Lost Art of System Administration

#57

Post by blacklion »

smitty1e wrote: post #12

Storage management is a real point here. When everything is a blob in a cloud, who really cares about the underlying details?

Owners of the cloud (and, by transition, "your" data)?

And you should too, BTW. Or one day you learn, that cloud you choose to use don't have BOTH backups and redundancy, for example. Learn in a bad way.

Or, maybe, you'll learn, that you need 10x more performance now (more throughput, less latency), and this cloud can not provide it at any cost.

Re: The Lost Art of System Administration

#58

Post by denton-scratch »

patrakov wrote: post #47
silverfox17 wrote: post #11

This seems a bit generalized. Yes, infrastructure as code/etc. are becoming more prevalent, but underneath there are still systems running. While a lot of jobs can abstract away these things, they are still there, and very real. If more people had an understanding of the underlying operating systems and file systems we could mitigate a lot of vulnerabilities, or find performance issues that may otherwise be obstructe…

Another part of the problem is that developers are often discouraged or outright not allowed to work with machines, due to "it's not your job" kind of arguments, or corporate security enforced by auditors.

You don't need corporate security or auditors; even in a small web-shop, administering production servers is a power reserved for wizards. Sure, you can administer your own developer workstation; perhaps you get a Linux VM to yourself, that you can tinker with.

It would be nuts to let every developer tinker with the production server, or the source-code repo, or the fileserver. The private VM gives them a playground where they can learn to play at sysadmin, if they want; real sysadmin, I would contend, is taking the burden of responsibility when shit happens. Nobody cares much about wizards, until shit happens; the wizard then becomes an essential scapegoat. The newsgroup alt.sysadmin.recovery wasn't created for nothing.

Re: The Lost Art of System Administration

#59

Post by mikewarot »

I started as the System Administrator for a small service company in 1997, at that time it was 40 hours of work per week just keeping things running, and users happy. Over the years, things got more and more reliable, until eventually I just would show up, wait for things to break, then go home. At that point, they outsourced IT, a wise decision.

Everything is much more stable than it used to be. It might seem not to be the case, but I assure you, it is. Once something works, it tends to keep working.

Re: The Lost Art of System Administration

#60

Post by AllegedAlec »

hsn915 wrote: post #25

The fact that linux systems need adminstration is one of the reasons why they suck. Imagine after buying a macbook that you also need to hire a sysadmin to keep it running smoothly? The idea is laughable. > Learning how to effectively use the command line. Unix philosophy. Pipes, scripting, and tooling. So much of programming is stitching things together. This is really bad. Much of the complexity in contemporary sof…

Good luck if you ever get security audited.
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