I absolutely love the sadservers. Can’t wait for windows version.
Advent of Sysadmin 2025
81–90 of 140 posts
Re: Advent of Sysadmin 2025
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
aren't they canonically 12? 12 days of christmas etc
Don't the 12 Days of Christmas start on the 25th though?
Yes, Christmas is the first of the twelve days of Christmas.
Advent begins on the fourth Sunday before Christmas, which was Nov 30 this year. It ends on Dec 24. Therefore it is technically anywhere from 22 to 28 days long.
Advent calendars begin on Dec 1 and end on Dec 25.
Re: Advent of Sysadmin 2025
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
GitLab pipelines are really good.
Not in love with its insistence on recreating the container from scratch every step of the pipeline, among a bundle of other irksome quirks. There are certainly worse choices, though.
Opposite of Jenkins where you have shared workspaces and have to manually ensure workspace is clean or suffer from reproducibility issues with tainted workspaces.
Re: Advent of Sysadmin 2025
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> 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…
In full-cloud environments, in small/middle companies I've worked at: Developers handle 1). Devops handle 2)/3)/5). Nobody does 4)
Thanks. That is an interesting insight into the current reality. I assume the developers take care of optimization of queries; set up indexes and development of schemas and DB backups is handled by devops.
I must say, again I thought (I read it somewhere?) DevOps should take care of the constant battle between Devs and Operations (I've seen enough of that in my times) by merging 1 and 2 together. But it seems just a name change, and if anything, seems worst, as a (IMHO) critical and central component, like the DB, now has totally distributed responsibilities. I would like to know what happens when e.g. a DB crashes because a filesystem is full, "because one developer made another index, because one from devops had a complaint because X was too slow".
Either the people are extremely more professional that in my times, or it must be a shitshow to look while eating pop-corn.
Re: Advent of Sysadmin 2025
#85Here'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…
Best practice is to use IP-restricted keys.
Re: Advent of Sysadmin 2025
#86Re: Advent of Sysadmin 2025
#87It seems it's called SRE nowadays right? I hate how things keep being renamed for no reason other than making more buzzwords for suits.
The definition I liked best, which I _think_ came from one of the Google SRE books though I'm not certain, was: "SRE is what happens when you consider operations to be a software problem".
Re: Advent of Sysadmin 2025
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
bugs happen to all of us. whats your better solution - gitlab?
honestly jenkins really isnt that bad
Hudson/Jenkins is just not architected for large, multi-project deployments, isolated environments and specialized nodes. It can work if you do not need these features, but otherwise it's fight against the environment.
You need a beefy master and it is your single point of failure. Untimely triggers of heavy jobs overwhelm controller? All projects are down. Jobs need to be carefully crafted to be resumable at all.
Heavy reliance on master means that even sending out webhooks on stage status changes is extremely error prone.
When your jobs require certain tools to be available you are expected to package those as part of agent deployment as Jenkins relies on host tools. In reality you end up rolling your own tool management system that every job has to call in some canonical manner.
There is no built in way to isolate environments. You can harden the system a bit with various ACLs, but in the end if you either have to trust projects or build up and maintain infrastructures for different projects isolated at host level.
In cases when time-wise significant processing happens externally, you have to block an executor.
Re: Advent of Sysadmin 2025
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
In full-cloud environments, in small/middle companies I've worked at: Developers handle 1). Devops handle 2)/3)/5). Nobody does 4)
Thanks. That is an interesting insight into the current reality. I assume the developers take care of optimization of queries; set up indexes and development of schemas and DB backups is handled by devops. I must say, again I thought (I read it somewhere?) DevOps should take care of the constant battle between Devs and Operations (I've seen enough of that in my times) by merging 1 and 2 together. But it seems just a…
> DevOps should take care of the constant battle between Devs and Operations
In practice there is no way to relay "query fubar, fix" back, because we are much agile, very scrum: feature is done when the ticket is closed, new tickets are handled by product owners. Reality is antithesis of that double Ouroboros.
In practice developers write code, devops deploy "teh clouds" (writing yamls is the deving part) and we throw moar servers at some cloud db when performance becomes sub-par.
Re: Advent of Sysadmin 2025
#90now we need advent of arts,math etc
For math, the AMC 10 and AMC 12 tests have 25 questions each, some of them quite challenging. Both are high school level math, no calculus. Search "2025 amc 10" for this year's problems and solutions.