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Advent of Sysadmin 2025

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Re: Advent of Sysadmin 2025

#61

Post by dontdoxxme »

Without sharing too many spoilers... I solved the challenge but the check script was unhappy. The curl commands in the script worked fine, the earlier parts of the script failed, i.e. it didn't like how I'd decided to make that work.

This kind of thing annoys me. This is why CTFs are great, where the goal is to get the flag string. Obviously harder to do for sysadmin, but expecting a particular configuration when I managed to make it work without doing things exactly as they wanted is no better than a poorly written exam.

Re: Advent of Sysadmin 2025

#63

Post by speakspokespok »

swyx wrote: post #49
shoo wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Roll 2d6, sum result. Your CI migration target is: 2. migrate secret manager. Roll again 3. cloud build 4. gocd 5. jenkins 6. gitlab 7. github actions 8. bamboo 9. codepipeline 10. buildbot 11. team foundation server 12. migrate version control. Roll again

somehow i am really liking the kind of people that comment in the comment sections of sysadmin posts. i wonder what personality type this is

SysEng

Re: Advent of Sysadmin 2025

#65

Post by jagged-chisel »

technion wrote: post #60
hansmayer wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you describe sounds more like a MS "Modern Workplace" / IT support in a corporate environment.

Are we arguing that corporate workers arent "real sysadmins"?

Pretty sure they mean “general IT support isn’t sysadmin work.”

Re: Advent of Sysadmin 2025

#66

Post by kralos »

fduran wrote: post #23
kralos wrote: post #20

imagine typing in a terminal... you want to delete the previous word so press ctrl+w... actually you're in a browser; the window closes... :sadness:

hello, creator here, sorry about that. In this case you can click again on the "Open the Server Terminal in a New Window" button

It would be cool if we could SSH into the temporary host (I'm guessing these hosts currently aren't internet connected to avoid abuse so might not be possible or require some super careful firewalling)

Re: Advent of Sysadmin 2025

#67

Post by f1shy »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #14

Here's 12 Sysadmin/DevOps (they're synonyms now!) challenges, straight from the day job: 1. Get a user to stop logging in as root. 2. Get all users to stop sharing the same login and password for all servers. 3. Get a user to upgrade their app's dependencies to versions newer than 2010. 4. Get a user to use configuration management rather than scp'ing config files from their laptop to the server. 5. Get a user to bak…

>> Sysadmin/DevOps (they're synonyms now!)

Is this really like that? Isn't there any Unix/DBA anymore? I associate DevOps to what at my time we called "operations" and "development". We had 5 teams or so:

1) Developers, who would architect and write code, 2) Operations who would deploy, monitor and address customer complaints, 3) Unix (aka SYS) administrators, who would take care of housekeeping of well, the OS (and web servers/middleware), 4) DBA who would be monitoring and optimizing Oracle/Postgres, and 5) Network admins, who would take care of Load Balancers, Routers, Switches, Firewalls (well, there were 2 security experts for that also)

So I think DevOps would be a mix of 1&2, to avoid the daily wars that would constantly happen "THEY did it wrong!"

Can somebody clear my mind, please!? It seems I was out of it for too long?!

Re: Advent of Sysadmin 2025

#68

Post by bionsystem »

n4bz0r wrote: post #56
bionsystem wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I was thinking of using it for us actually. Connects to everything, lots of plugins, etc. I wonder what the hate is from, they are all pretty bad aren't they ? Will test forgejo's CI first as we'll use the repo anyway, but if it ain't for me, it's going to be jenkins I assume.

Cons: - DSL is harder to get into. - Hard to reproduce a setup unless builds are in DSL and Jenkins itself is in a fixed version container with everything stored in easily transferable bind volumes; config export/import isn't straightforward. - Builds tend to break in a really weird way when something (even external things like Gitea) updates. - I've had my setup broken once after updating Jenkins and not being able…

I have a previous experience with it. I agree with most points. Jobs can be downloaded as xml config and thus kept/versioned. But the rest is valid. I just don't want to manage gitlab, we already have it at corp level, just can't use it right now in preprod/prod and I need something which will be either throwaway or kept just for very specific tasks that shouldn't move much in the long run.

Re: Advent of Sysadmin 2025

#69

Post by Nextgrid »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #14

Here's 12 Sysadmin/DevOps (they're synonyms now!) challenges, straight from the day job: 1. Get a user to stop logging in as root. 2. Get all users to stop sharing the same login and password for all servers. 3. Get a user to upgrade their app's dependencies to versions newer than 2010. 4. Get a user to use configuration management rather than scp'ing config files from their laptop to the server. 5. Get a user to bak…

> Get a user to stop logging in as root.

It really depends if the machine is hosting anything that you don't want some users to access. If the machine is single-purpose and any user is already able to access everything valuable from it (DB with customer data, etc) or trivially elevate to root (via sudo, docker access, etc) then it's just pointless extra typing and security theatre.

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