Ask HN: “HN” for Sysadmins?
78 comments
Some subreddits are OK like /r/sysadmin. However I find that many communities suffer from a snarky mentality. People who thinik they know everything responding negatively or belittling people who ask questions instead of just answering it. I haven't described it well but I'm sure you know what I'm talking about.
The various Discords associated with the IT subs are miles ahead in general conversation and overall discourse. Unfortunately its live chat so keeping up with the constant conversation is tough, at least for me it is.
Unfortunately most of the IT related subreddits are just people complaining about how stupid users/management are.
At some point in your career, you will meet the IT person who genuinely enjoys the look of surprise when someone learns something from them, even if they thought it trivial. They will be the person that connects with your dev team, connects with your users, and other non-technical employees, and they will typically get the curse of "give it to the busiest guy in the room if you want it done", unfortunately.
It's our job as good engineers to recognize these people and treat them with the respect we want to be treated with, so they don't become the pissed off IT know it all we have all met already. When you see them wanting to implement a ticketing system because they are too busy all the time, use that ticketing system joyfully and respectfully. They will remember it, and you will stay their friend.
Sometimes you can bring the know it all back down to reality with simply demonstrating through empathy what those stupid users and management are going through. If they're too far gone, they might just be jerks. It, like development, is a stressful field where success gets you more work.
It's our job as good engineers to recognize these people and treat them with the respect we want to be treated with, so they don't become the pissed off IT know it all we have all met already. When you see them wanting to implement a ticketing system because they are too busy all the time, use that ticketing system joyfully and respectfully. They will remember it, and you will stay their friend.
Sometimes you can bring the know it all back down to reality with simply demonstrating through empathy what those stupid users and management are going through. If they're too far gone, they might just be jerks. It, like development, is a stressful field where success gets you more work.
Yes that too! The stories are relateable but I feel like it should be more widely accepted that dealing with difficult people and situaions is as much part of the job as diagnosing slow servers.
> However I find that many communities suffer from a snarky mentality
Many sysadmins suffer from a snarky mentality (and I include myself in that)
Many sysadmins suffer from a snarky mentality (and I include myself in that)
To be honest, r/sysadmin isn't that great. It seems most posts are not about technology but about how they want to quit their jobs. Even though i think sysadmin jobs are pretty good.
r/sysadmin feels like an authentic slice of the population of sysadmins I've met. A lot of those posts I can almost hear in the voice of various sysadmins I've worked with in each snarky, "I hate my job" post.
>Some subreddits are OK like /r/sysadmin. However I find that many communities suffer from a snarky mentality. People who thinik they know everything responding negatively or belittling people who ask questions instead of just answering it. I haven't described it well but I'm sure you know what I'm talking about.
When you put together a bunch of soulless people, it's going to devolve as such. You do have to consider for a second though it's not about negativity or belittling but rather finding the answer.
If I post a thread and ask 'How do you improve performance of threading in python?' You might get a couple people who want to help. You likely won't get the true answer of GIL. Overall the thread will fail.
If you post a thread, 'python threading sucks, doesnt improve performance.' You're going to get 50 people with PHD level answers explaining in depth how you're wrong. You suddenly have your answer.
When you put together a bunch of soulless people, it's going to devolve as such. You do have to consider for a second though it's not about negativity or belittling but rather finding the answer.
If I post a thread and ask 'How do you improve performance of threading in python?' You might get a couple people who want to help. You likely won't get the true answer of GIL. Overall the thread will fail.
If you post a thread, 'python threading sucks, doesnt improve performance.' You're going to get 50 people with PHD level answers explaining in depth how you're wrong. You suddenly have your answer.
Yeah, asking honest questions and showing that you did some homework sadly gives you very low engagement and often no answers at all.
Being a bit more clickbaity and outright claiming something wrong does indeed bring out a lot of people out of their abodes.
Being a bit more clickbaity and outright claiming something wrong does indeed bring out a lot of people out of their abodes.
Reminds me of this XKCD: https://xkcd.com/386/
Yep. Sadly people are more prone to correct somebody who said something wrong, than to answer an honest question.
> responding negatively or belittling people who ask questions instead of just answering it. I haven't described it well but I'm sure you know what I'm talking about.
I have seen worse. People who ask questions and you can clearly deduce from the way they ask and describe the problem that they lack understanding of a piece of the puzzle.
Then snarkyadmin answers exactly to the question, with snarks and - in my opinion - waste the poster's time by not mentioning how the piece really works.
There's also a poster who doesn't know there is an additional piece of the puzzle they are not aware of and snarkyadmin answers like poster knows it and then feints surprises and blame poster for wasting everyone's time by not crafting a good enough question.
Saw it this week-end when a poster asked how to configure let's encrypt certificate on his vps and snarkyadmin explained poster should rename his vps hostname and dance with cname and ip when clearly the setup the poster had didn't need that to configure his lets encrypt renewal. But snarkyadmin was kind enough to point to SNI documentation. For a single domain.
On that note, that's one of the reasons I only google IT problems in English. Can't stand the french anymore.
I have seen worse. People who ask questions and you can clearly deduce from the way they ask and describe the problem that they lack understanding of a piece of the puzzle.
Then snarkyadmin answers exactly to the question, with snarks and - in my opinion - waste the poster's time by not mentioning how the piece really works.
There's also a poster who doesn't know there is an additional piece of the puzzle they are not aware of and snarkyadmin answers like poster knows it and then feints surprises and blame poster for wasting everyone's time by not crafting a good enough question.
Saw it this week-end when a poster asked how to configure let's encrypt certificate on his vps and snarkyadmin explained poster should rename his vps hostname and dance with cname and ip when clearly the setup the poster had didn't need that to configure his lets encrypt renewal. But snarkyadmin was kind enough to point to SNI documentation. For a single domain.
On that note, that's one of the reasons I only google IT problems in English. Can't stand the french anymore.
I've always wondered if the difference in tone between French and English that I usually perceive on forums has something to do with French being my mother tongue. Indeed it usually feels like there's more snarkiness when people speak French, and the discussion quickly turns to a battle to know who's the smartest, all the while leaving the criteria of what defines being smart unanswered.
There's a difference for sure, at least in my perception, but some of that is my own baggage. I'll give an example: I was using Symfony for a project, but found the tone of the Symfony website and tutorials, in the English texts, to be annoying and a little patronizing and a little self-aggrandizing. But one day I heard a youtube video with Symfony founder, and Frenchman, Fabien Potencier speaking. For the first time I understood his genuine enthusiasm. Up to then, I'd been "hearing" it wrong -- same text, different emphasis and intonation.
Now when I read the text, I try to imagine M. Potencier saying it aloud, and it sounds almost dear.
Could it be the cuisine? I have yet to eat anything that tastes as it should in France.
I know French cuisine is famous, but eating anything tasty in Paris without being a local is one hell of challenge.
I know French cuisine is famous, but eating anything tasty in Paris without being a local is one hell of challenge.
> I know French cuisine is famous, but eating anything tasty in Paris without being a local is one hell of challenge.
I only ate once in a Paris restaurant and 10 minutes after sitting down I had the chef harassing me because the waitress couldn't understand my botched Italian when I tried to order a pizza.
She couldn't understand my Italian because she only spoke French.
But the whole menu was in Italian. I do not speak a word of Italian. So I just tried to read the words aloud with my best efforts.
"Why are you doing that ? What if everyone started ordering things in Italian ?" was shouting the chef when he came back.
I kid you not.
Anyway, that was the worst, I don't remember bad culinary experiences but I tend to stick to stuff I know I will like. I am not french though :].
I only ate once in a Paris restaurant and 10 minutes after sitting down I had the chef harassing me because the waitress couldn't understand my botched Italian when I tried to order a pizza.
She couldn't understand my Italian because she only spoke French.
But the whole menu was in Italian. I do not speak a word of Italian. So I just tried to read the words aloud with my best efforts.
"Why are you doing that ? What if everyone started ordering things in Italian ?" was shouting the chef when he came back.
I kid you not.
Anyway, that was the worst, I don't remember bad culinary experiences but I tend to stick to stuff I know I will like. I am not french though :].
> I've always wondered if the difference in tone between French and English that I usually perceive on forums has something to do with French being my mother tongue. Indeed it usually feels like there's more snarkiness when people speak French
I almost added a paragraph to my post about that because when I replied to the aforementioned thread to help the person with his VPS I thought my first draft was.. a bit too snarky :/.
I don't know if it's because of the way IT people usually write or if it's inherent to the french language. There's is something to be said about the passive voice that is more predominant in english (or so was I told when learning english). Eg: simple vous avez atteint la limite de certificat gratuit, donc oui vous avez fait le bourrin sachant que la limite est de 5 certificats pour un même domaine et par semaine. vs "Il y a une limite de 5 certificats gratuits par semaine pour un même domaine, donc quand le serveur LE en a délivré 5 il n'en donnera plus avant une semaine". It struck me because "vous avez fait le bourrin" implies the person intentionally behaved like a brute when it's likely his retries that triggered the limit and he was missing the information that there was such a limit. I also suppose he was trying to debug if he could even reach LE for renewal. I know I did that too when I first setup traefik automatic renewal :].
For what it's worth I don't feel the same way at all when talking orally with french IT people.
There also might be a 'forum' french culture where being snarky was rewarded. I feel the same vibe on french twitter.
I almost added a paragraph to my post about that because when I replied to the aforementioned thread to help the person with his VPS I thought my first draft was.. a bit too snarky :/.
I don't know if it's because of the way IT people usually write or if it's inherent to the french language. There's is something to be said about the passive voice that is more predominant in english (or so was I told when learning english). Eg: simple vous avez atteint la limite de certificat gratuit, donc oui vous avez fait le bourrin sachant que la limite est de 5 certificats pour un même domaine et par semaine. vs "Il y a une limite de 5 certificats gratuits par semaine pour un même domaine, donc quand le serveur LE en a délivré 5 il n'en donnera plus avant une semaine". It struck me because "vous avez fait le bourrin" implies the person intentionally behaved like a brute when it's likely his retries that triggered the limit and he was missing the information that there was such a limit. I also suppose he was trying to debug if he could even reach LE for renewal. I know I did that too when I first setup traefik automatic renewal :].
For what it's worth I don't feel the same way at all when talking orally with french IT people.
There also might be a 'forum' french culture where being snarky was rewarded. I feel the same vibe on french twitter.
I think that in general it's freeing to be outside of your native language, because you don't understand it well enough to catch all the possible subtexts, the hidden cruelties, the subtle status signals.
I think one of the key characteristics of HN that eliminates this to some extent is the focus on discussion and not jokes. This drives real debate, conversation, insights, or support instead of snarky-ness, in-group signaling, or memes.
instead of snarky-ness, in-group signaling
Hugely matter of perspective.
Hugely matter of perspective.
Snarky and priesthood mentality has been an issue from the days of Novell Netware and BBSs. Sadly, it is human nature, and is worse in the technical community.
The problem with all of these HN for "X" solutions is that HN has lots of stuff in it that is not focused on webdev, startups, and programming and often that stuff is among the most popular.
But of technical issues webdev, startups, and programming do have a bonus it seems.
So if I were going to make an HN for sysadmins I would just make something that took everything from HN but if it were detected that it was of especial interest to Sysadmins it had a bonus time on the front page or perhaps a default +2 points when posted - how to detect? Perhaps see if the link is being discussed in any of the more sysadmin focused sites already mentioned here?
But of technical issues webdev, startups, and programming do have a bonus it seems.
So if I were going to make an HN for sysadmins I would just make something that took everything from HN but if it were detected that it was of especial interest to Sysadmins it had a bonus time on the front page or perhaps a default +2 points when posted - how to detect? Perhaps see if the link is being discussed in any of the more sysadmin focused sites already mentioned here?
> if it were detected that it was of especial interest to Sysadmins
How would you do that? Keyword matching jumps to mind, but did you have something else up your sleeve?
How would you do that? Keyword matching jumps to mind, but did you have something else up your sleeve?
I figure there are various things - some of them would be doable if HN actually decided to do something like this, which I guess they would if HN was something they made money from instead of something they use to promote ycombinator stuff.
Since that's not going to change I would say
1. sure - keyword matching
2. have a crawler checking for links showing up in the various services described here as being sysadmin focused sites.
3. Probably would want to have something that determined some domains whose pages always showed up in the attendant services were automatically of interest - although could maybe just do that by hand.
at some later date allow people to get a membership in SysN, they would have an HN associated account (perhaps SysN membership needs HN minimum 1000 points, minimum 1 month on HN), have rules for how they could upvote things in SysN (perhaps SysN upvote worth 2 and HN vote worth 1) - perhaps also things posted by these SysN interested HN members would then be in a pool for easy upvoting in some way.
This last point is of course more suited to HN itself doing it (and probably would need more thought behind it than a quick brainstorm), if they wanted to build some sort of news communities solution like stackexchange is a community of answer sites.
on edit: formatting
Since that's not going to change I would say
1. sure - keyword matching
2. have a crawler checking for links showing up in the various services described here as being sysadmin focused sites.
3. Probably would want to have something that determined some domains whose pages always showed up in the attendant services were automatically of interest - although could maybe just do that by hand.
at some later date allow people to get a membership in SysN, they would have an HN associated account (perhaps SysN membership needs HN minimum 1000 points, minimum 1 month on HN), have rules for how they could upvote things in SysN (perhaps SysN upvote worth 2 and HN vote worth 1) - perhaps also things posted by these SysN interested HN members would then be in a pool for easy upvoting in some way.
This last point is of course more suited to HN itself doing it (and probably would need more thought behind it than a quick brainstorm), if they wanted to build some sort of news communities solution like stackexchange is a community of answer sites.
on edit: formatting
I'm somewhat taken aback by the number of references to r/sysadmin in this thread. Honestly, I come to HN to escape the hole of suck that is reddit(imho), and have been idly hoping to find other communities like HN. I was excited to see this Ask thread, thought to myself "finally, maybe another site will be discovered..."
Sad to see it is not happening, but I'm not sure what to do about it - like most people I don't have time or inclination to create a site and hustle it over the hump and reach critical mass. what to do!?
Sad to see it is not happening, but I'm not sure what to do about it - like most people I don't have time or inclination to create a site and hustle it over the hump and reach critical mass. what to do!?
I guess I would regard myself as a sysadmin, though the term has greatly fallen out of favour and people prefer "DevOps" or "SRE" these days (and sysadmin is synonymous with Windows Admins who just click boxes or field simple tickets all day, the stuff that sysadmins used to automate away).
So, finding places for DevOps and SRE's is advised, as that's where most of the sysadmins are.
So, finding places for DevOps and SRE's is advised, as that's where most of the sysadmins are.
The stuff that DevOps and SREs do is what SysAdmins have always done, but developers don’t seem to have known that, or intentionally ignored it, and invented a bunch of new labels for things that already existed. The idea that SysAdmins are just Windows button clickers and tape monkeys was completely invented by the DevOps movement as a way to create an “other” so they could justify their “new thing”.
I do agree, however, that this coup has been successful, so using those search terms will probably result in what most SysAdmins are looking for.
I do agree, however, that this coup has been successful, so using those search terms will probably result in what most SysAdmins are looking for.
Doesn't DevOps/SRE apply mostly to folks that work for FAANGs or other tech companies and keep the infrastructure going? In my experience, plain old businesses still employ network admins/sysadmins like me. My sysadmin experience is in healthcare and higher-ed.
You'll find DevOps engineers (which isn't a thing[1], but unfortunately, is a thing[2]) wherever there's a tech product being developed, and SRE you'll find wherever a company has figured out that they need a real discipline to organize keeping their website/product/service reliably up.
"Plain old" businesses could benefit greatly from DevOps. Even health care and higher-ed. The problem is, "regular people" see "IT people" as this mysterious cabal, and the people "in IT" often remain at exactly the same skill level and keep the same practices out of habit. But even a "regular old" IT department can up-skill with DevOps and SRE practices. There's a lot of practical advice buried within those two buzzwords.
I still consider myself a Sysadmin, but I learned later how to "do DevOps", Site Reliability Engineering, and Systems Engineering. Even if you only work on small projects, it can really level up your career, and how your brain works in general. DevOps in particular is a deep rabbit hole that covers a couple dozen non-technical topics.
[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=there's+no+such+thing+as+a+devops+... [2] https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=devops%20engineer
"Plain old" businesses could benefit greatly from DevOps. Even health care and higher-ed. The problem is, "regular people" see "IT people" as this mysterious cabal, and the people "in IT" often remain at exactly the same skill level and keep the same practices out of habit. But even a "regular old" IT department can up-skill with DevOps and SRE practices. There's a lot of practical advice buried within those two buzzwords.
I still consider myself a Sysadmin, but I learned later how to "do DevOps", Site Reliability Engineering, and Systems Engineering. Even if you only work on small projects, it can really level up your career, and how your brain works in general. DevOps in particular is a deep rabbit hole that covers a couple dozen non-technical topics.
[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=there's+no+such+thing+as+a+devops+... [2] https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=devops%20engineer
I think many forget that at the end of the day, you're still just administering systems and hopefully doing the least amount of manual work as practical.
If you had two on prem servers, you'd be working to get the most out of them and trying to reduce downtime, while meeting the needs of the business.
If you had K8s clusters running 1000s of containers across the planet, you'd still be working to get the most out of them and trying to reduce downtime, while meeting the needs of the business.
I'm greatly simplifying of course, but slapping some buzzwords on didn't make it a brand new discipline.
If you had two on prem servers, you'd be working to get the most out of them and trying to reduce downtime, while meeting the needs of the business.
If you had K8s clusters running 1000s of containers across the planet, you'd still be working to get the most out of them and trying to reduce downtime, while meeting the needs of the business.
I'm greatly simplifying of course, but slapping some buzzwords on didn't make it a brand new discipline.
I've been doing sysadmin for 14 years at this point.
Sysadmins of yore already did the things that SRE's and "DevOps Engineers" do; except they had less computing power to care for.
I think it's an incredibly large strawman that everything "devops" and "SRE" espouses was never thought of before, it's just as disciplines mature things get easier and thus you can target better things.
Monitoring used to be extremely hard: now it's less hard.
Reproducible compute used to be extremely hard: now it's actually quite easy.
Configuration management used to be quite hard: but now it's easy and accessible to many.
But equally: Developing distributed systems used to be a lot harder than it is today, but the difference is we don't marr the word "Developer" by making it out to be something that goes against building distributed systems or linting their code. The role evolved with the times, but people were happy to retire the name sysadmin.
Even though Sysadmins were doing the same things as SRE's today, just with more primitive tools, and thus: were less effective.
Sysadmins of yore already did the things that SRE's and "DevOps Engineers" do; except they had less computing power to care for.
I think it's an incredibly large strawman that everything "devops" and "SRE" espouses was never thought of before, it's just as disciplines mature things get easier and thus you can target better things.
Monitoring used to be extremely hard: now it's less hard.
Reproducible compute used to be extremely hard: now it's actually quite easy.
Configuration management used to be quite hard: but now it's easy and accessible to many.
But equally: Developing distributed systems used to be a lot harder than it is today, but the difference is we don't marr the word "Developer" by making it out to be something that goes against building distributed systems or linting their code. The role evolved with the times, but people were happy to retire the name sysadmin.
Even though Sysadmins were doing the same things as SRE's today, just with more primitive tools, and thus: were less effective.
Nobody is arguing that DevOps and SRE are brand new. But saying "sysadmins were doing then what SRE does today" is a bit like saying "builders in the 1500s were doing what builders today do".
Yeah, they're building houses, and trying to make sure they don't fall on somebody's head. But the practices are quite a bit more developed now, and the old-school people don't know what the new-school people are doing. So it's still worth learning and separating from what came before, because the advantages of the new practices outweigh those of the old.
Yeah, they're building houses, and trying to make sure they don't fall on somebody's head. But the practices are quite a bit more developed now, and the old-school people don't know what the new-school people are doing. So it's still worth learning and separating from what came before, because the advantages of the new practices outweigh those of the old.
I'd go a bit further and say they usually accomplished the same thing with shoddier tools, but for a less spiky usage/volume pattern. And less reproducible, but even that only partially.
The only real difference I see is that nowadays they're writing more "software" and less "scripts", fwiw. But the amount of pessimistic thinking about what will break next is the same :)
The only real difference I see is that nowadays they're writing more "software" and less "scripts", fwiw. But the amount of pessimistic thinking about what will break next is the same :)
[deleted]
If you can't scale to a billion people overnight, you don't have a real business /s
There are currently two flavors of SRE in the marketplace: one role supports public-facing internet applications; the other is as the parent describes, the ‘modern’ sysadmin who will understand how to do more than click boxes in a GUI.
It’s mostly used in cloud environments in my experience. Where you’re codifying everything (infra, security etc.) into a CI/CD pipeline and automating everything.
In healthcare they are a lot slower to fully embrace cloud and CI/CD. So you have a lot on prem data center or hybrid cloud where you’re less likely to see teams fully embracing DevOps.
I’d start reading up on this stuff as healthcare is (slowly) migrating.
In healthcare they are a lot slower to fully embrace cloud and CI/CD. So you have a lot on prem data center or hybrid cloud where you’re less likely to see teams fully embracing DevOps.
I’d start reading up on this stuff as healthcare is (slowly) migrating.
SRE doesn't imply cloud.
I'm quite certain the originators of the term would be very upset with that idea.
Cloud is a way of outsourcing some types of operations _to other companies SRE's_.
I'm quite certain the originators of the term would be very upset with that idea.
Cloud is a way of outsourcing some types of operations _to other companies SRE's_.
Cloud has nothing to do with outsourcing. We run an OpenStack on-prem cloud all in house. Plenty of major businesses to do. Cloud is a software abstraction to maximize the efficiency of your data center.
I was referring mostly to DevOPs practices mostly being found in cloud. You’re correct that SRE applies everywhere.
My experience is most big corporations are trying their hardest to get away from traditional enterprise architecture and into a hybrid/multi cloud architecture. The sysadmins at these corporations are either reskilling to add the Dev side of devops, or they are leaving and going to smaller shops not yet ready the transition.
I love HN because despite the bias for software development and entrepreneurship, the content - both links and comments - is pretty diverse. The users here truly come from all walks of life. For me the HN is great exactly because most content isn't directly relevant to me professionally, it's a source for a lot of information that probably will not reach me in other ways, but still benefits me in many ways.
An HN for Sysadmins will probably be just another r/sysadmin.
An HN for Sysadmins will probably be just another r/sysadmin.
> The users here truly come from all walks of life.
Boy is that true. I was amazed by this thread, which I ran across the other day, having completely missed it at the time:
Ask HN: Non-tech professionals on HN? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28788540 - Oct 2021 (207 comments)
Among others, I noticed (in their own words) a NASA nuclear space engineer, an underground mining engineer, an uneducated French house-husband, a California farmer, a cultural historian, an Anglican priest, a bassoon player in a professional orchestra, a manager at a Chicago pizzeria, a helicopter pilot, a voice actor, a dermatologist, a carpenter, a consulting hypnotist, and a retired neurosurgical anesthesiologist. That was fun.
Edit: a professional conductor? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31577957 - I feel like someone should keep track of these...
Boy is that true. I was amazed by this thread, which I ran across the other day, having completely missed it at the time:
Ask HN: Non-tech professionals on HN? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28788540 - Oct 2021 (207 comments)
Among others, I noticed (in their own words) a NASA nuclear space engineer, an underground mining engineer, an uneducated French house-husband, a California farmer, a cultural historian, an Anglican priest, a bassoon player in a professional orchestra, a manager at a Chicago pizzeria, a helicopter pilot, a voice actor, a dermatologist, a carpenter, a consulting hypnotist, and a retired neurosurgical anesthesiologist. That was fun.
Edit: a professional conductor? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31577957 - I feel like someone should keep track of these...
A space alien cat.
r/sysadmin primarily but it's not that great.
Unfortunately a lot of what used to make this area great has slowly died... IRC being the loss felt most keenly. It still "alive" and a few folks like my self still hang out in various channels but it's nothing like it was when I was getting started. Mailing lists being the other one, certain dev lists and network groups are still really active and frequented by folks that run the big NOCs but also in a sharp decline.
Some of it's being replaced by random Slack instances but this is shit.
Unsure what can be done other than try bootstrap a community.
Unfortunately a lot of what used to make this area great has slowly died... IRC being the loss felt most keenly. It still "alive" and a few folks like my self still hang out in various channels but it's nothing like it was when I was getting started. Mailing lists being the other one, certain dev lists and network groups are still really active and frequented by folks that run the big NOCs but also in a sharp decline.
Some of it's being replaced by random Slack instances but this is shit.
Unsure what can be done other than try bootstrap a community.
I suspect it’s dying slowly. All the functional sysadmin stuff is being rolled into devops and cloud operations these days and all the old school folk, me included, are being pushed into management. It’s sad really as it’s part of my life I really enjoyed.
Sysadmins taking about how the industry is evolving always reminds me of an auto mechanic complaining that cars don't need regular "tuneups" anymore.
system administration hasn't died though it's just using more complex/sophisticated tooling than existed in the past and requires more development chops. Resulting in new names for the roles and the old hangouts becoming less relevant as they were arranged topically around technologies that are falling out of use primarily (atleast in the case of IRC channels etc). There isn't really a new home for these communities outside of stuff like the Apache and Kubernetes Slack instances which is very sad.
Probably not like HN but probably more useful to a sysadmin would be ServerFault [1] Casual or off topic discussion is discouraged which makes it much different than HN or Reddit.
[1] - https://serverfault.com/
[1] - https://serverfault.com/
sysadmins are kind of a dying breed where what's left at this point is mostly split into either the IT sector (which seems like it's mainly Windows admins and MSPs supporting small businesses) or the programming side of things with "DevOps" and "SRE" and other neo-admin nonsense. So personally I just mostly hang out in programming focused spaces or just general tech communities like a couple imageboards.
Sadly, the neo-admin sphere really isn't the same as sysadmin, because the culture is just entirely different. Granted I'm way too young to have been there for the good old days (God I should have just become a programmer) but from what I've seen of it, sysadmins had this individualistic old school tech culture that almost bordered on being kind of punk rock. Back then solving the problems required of an admin was something that could be done with shell scripts or Perl, so each individual sysadmin could have their own bespoke suite of scripts they'd written all on their own, but as time has gone on and the tech industry has exploded, suddenly everything supposedly has to be able to infinitely scale up. Everything becomes more homogenized and there's no longer any room for a BOFH type character rebelling against middle management and the corporate world, because his job is being replaced by an assembly line CI/CD mentality. It's quite simply the transition the Industrial Revolution ushered in from skilled artisan labor to unskilled industrial labor being repeated in the tech industry.
That's not to say there aren't fundamental problems with Linux and other Unix-like OSes that made the transition necessary, but a lot of the draw for me personally as an admin person was the culture and the identity, aside from just also getting into technology via chan tech boards that got me interested in tinkering with Linux specifically. The DevOps mindset of everything being a disposable Docker container and everything being configured in YAML instead of an actual scripting language (unless you're writing small tools with Python I guess) just isn't the same as being master of all the unique, on-site servers you admin and have taken care in naming.
Sadly, the neo-admin sphere really isn't the same as sysadmin, because the culture is just entirely different. Granted I'm way too young to have been there for the good old days (God I should have just become a programmer) but from what I've seen of it, sysadmins had this individualistic old school tech culture that almost bordered on being kind of punk rock. Back then solving the problems required of an admin was something that could be done with shell scripts or Perl, so each individual sysadmin could have their own bespoke suite of scripts they'd written all on their own, but as time has gone on and the tech industry has exploded, suddenly everything supposedly has to be able to infinitely scale up. Everything becomes more homogenized and there's no longer any room for a BOFH type character rebelling against middle management and the corporate world, because his job is being replaced by an assembly line CI/CD mentality. It's quite simply the transition the Industrial Revolution ushered in from skilled artisan labor to unskilled industrial labor being repeated in the tech industry.
That's not to say there aren't fundamental problems with Linux and other Unix-like OSes that made the transition necessary, but a lot of the draw for me personally as an admin person was the culture and the identity, aside from just also getting into technology via chan tech boards that got me interested in tinkering with Linux specifically. The DevOps mindset of everything being a disposable Docker container and everything being configured in YAML instead of an actual scripting language (unless you're writing small tools with Python I guess) just isn't the same as being master of all the unique, on-site servers you admin and have taken care in naming.
This really resonated with me as it's what I've observed but couldn't word quite as well.
I too am too young and late to the party. Raised and taught by Windows sysadmins who got their start in the early 2000s just before the dotcom crash. I was basically molded into a Windows sysadmin from a young age. I started to hate Windows around when Vista came out because of the UAC restrictions my old man would place on my PC, preventing me from playing with new software or using my computer late into the night, so I started experimenting with Linux live CDs. Fast forward 10 years. Debian is my daily driver. I only use Windows at work. I can't really code (cognitive thing, doesn't quite click), but I'm comfy in a terminal environment, I can rewrite config files, deploy OSes, do other hardware, admin, and network tasks easily.
Tried to find anybody that would take me for this type of work, but in this area, everyone making under $100k is remote IT from companies with names like "G.S. International Computers", and the environments are always outsourced call centers with headsets, techs being forced to drive into the city to do something that's still remote. Ended up in a call center like that, slowly dying inside, trying to get out but every role I can find is a worse version of this one. It's homogenized as you put it, no more room for the IT crowd kind. Tickets and timers and management cracking the whip, out of touch with you, and you have no idea what the customer's network looks like until they call. On the hook for an army of decaying Windows machines at remote sites, that the business side says it's too expensive to replace.
Friend's dad is still a sysadmin, one of that dying breed, has a lot of free time to write poetry and shitpost. My old man is a project manager somewhere now, he hasn't touched hardware in 15 years. I still can't find a niche despite all the people I seem to know. Thinking about giving it up as a career.
I too am too young and late to the party. Raised and taught by Windows sysadmins who got their start in the early 2000s just before the dotcom crash. I was basically molded into a Windows sysadmin from a young age. I started to hate Windows around when Vista came out because of the UAC restrictions my old man would place on my PC, preventing me from playing with new software or using my computer late into the night, so I started experimenting with Linux live CDs. Fast forward 10 years. Debian is my daily driver. I only use Windows at work. I can't really code (cognitive thing, doesn't quite click), but I'm comfy in a terminal environment, I can rewrite config files, deploy OSes, do other hardware, admin, and network tasks easily.
Tried to find anybody that would take me for this type of work, but in this area, everyone making under $100k is remote IT from companies with names like "G.S. International Computers", and the environments are always outsourced call centers with headsets, techs being forced to drive into the city to do something that's still remote. Ended up in a call center like that, slowly dying inside, trying to get out but every role I can find is a worse version of this one. It's homogenized as you put it, no more room for the IT crowd kind. Tickets and timers and management cracking the whip, out of touch with you, and you have no idea what the customer's network looks like until they call. On the hook for an army of decaying Windows machines at remote sites, that the business side says it's too expensive to replace.
Friend's dad is still a sysadmin, one of that dying breed, has a lot of free time to write poetry and shitpost. My old man is a project manager somewhere now, he hasn't touched hardware in 15 years. I still can't find a niche despite all the people I seem to know. Thinking about giving it up as a career.
I've seen a few HN clones in the past posted on here, but they've never gained any traction and became defunct about a year later. What does OP mean by 'HN For'? I mean if we're talking topics, it's trivial to use the search box at the bottom to search for your topic of interest. One overlooked place for taxonomy'd topics is Pinboard: https://pinboard.in/t:sysadmin (You need an account to view the tags, but a Pinboard account is relatively cheap to obtain).
I don't work as a sysadmin, but I run a popular phpBB forum out of my own pocket (and donations), and I don't think it really fits the moniker of 'sysadmin', but I operate and maintain 2 servers (one for the live site, and a backup VPS incase the live site goes down). I regularly use the command line and have to tinker with a lot of settings to keep the board running smoothly (banning users, bots, bad faith actors etc).
My handle here on HN is not to be taken seriously. I made it for fun :)
I don't work as a sysadmin, but I run a popular phpBB forum out of my own pocket (and donations), and I don't think it really fits the moniker of 'sysadmin', but I operate and maintain 2 servers (one for the live site, and a backup VPS incase the live site goes down). I regularly use the command line and have to tinker with a lot of settings to keep the board running smoothly (banning users, bots, bad faith actors etc).
My handle here on HN is not to be taken seriously. I made it for fun :)
I used to feel that same way. But after reading HN for a while I got used to ignoring the items that don't interest me. But I've always been drawn to things outside my area of expertise. Full disclosure: I'm an ex-sysadmin, current "devops" type person. Waiting for RSS to make a comeback
If you’re DevOps you’re not an ex-sysadmin, you’ve just adopted a new label for the same thing that was invented to sound cooler.
The federated ecosystem for link aggregators and discussion platforms is increasing and maybe starting your own community based on one of them is an idea to keep in mind.
If I can toot my own horn in this regard, I'm working on such an alternative based on Go. The example instance I have up at the moment is a general purpose one, but you can easily create a your own. You can find it at https://littr.me
If you want to take a look at the code, there's some links in my bio.
The advantages of federated services is that you can keep your community small and tightly focused (like you said, dedicated to SysOps) but at the same time your users can subscribe to other instances and participate there through the federation mechanism.
If I can toot my own horn in this regard, I'm working on such an alternative based on Go. The example instance I have up at the moment is a general purpose one, but you can easily create a your own. You can find it at https://littr.me
If you want to take a look at the code, there's some links in my bio.
The advantages of federated services is that you can keep your community small and tightly focused (like you said, dedicated to SysOps) but at the same time your users can subscribe to other instances and participate there through the federation mechanism.
FreeBSDNews and some Slashdot topics have news for sysadmins:
https://www.freebsdnews.com/
Security Story Archive for Slashdot https://slashdot.org/archive.pl?op=topics&keyword=security
Unix Story Archive for Slashdot https://slashdot.org/archive.pl?op=topics&keyword=unix
https://www.freebsdnews.com/
Security Story Archive for Slashdot https://slashdot.org/archive.pl?op=topics&keyword=security
Unix Story Archive for Slashdot https://slashdot.org/archive.pl?op=topics&keyword=unix
It's good that HN is full of webdev stuff.
If it was full of high-quality sysadmin stuff then I'd spend whole days here and would not be able to get anything done
If it was full of high-quality sysadmin stuff then I'd spend whole days here and would not be able to get anything done
Discord:
http://aka.ms/winadmins - End user Compute management discussions(Intune/MECM/SCCM/M365/AzureAD)
https://aka.ms/ITOpsTalks-General - Azure administration and operations(More Azure Developer and operations related discussions)
http://aka.ms/winadmins - End user Compute management discussions(Intune/MECM/SCCM/M365/AzureAD)
https://aka.ms/ITOpsTalks-General - Azure administration and operations(More Azure Developer and operations related discussions)
Is it not Slashdot you're asking for? It has always felt to me to be dominated by sysadmins.
Alternative: Admin network and security magazine. Good admin articles.
Twenty years ago it would have been the Scary Devil Monastery. But that was another lifetime, and besides, the protocol is dead.
It's not dead.
It's in recovery.
It's in recovery.
"Sysadmin"? Is that still a thing? I thought we'd moved onto DevOps and SRE and Platform Engineer now.
Not sysadmin but there's lobste.rs which has less general content - maybe you'll find something interesting there, unless of course you do know it already
The content of lobste.rs is pretty good but I found the overall mentality pretty elitist to say the least. I spent a few weeks in their IRC channel but after a while I just left without an invite because I felt that it wasn’t really a group of people that I wanted to be a part of. This is obviously a subjective opinion but it’s not a feeling I often get when approaching online communities, so for me it was remarkable.
The thing about invites is that you're culpable for the people you invite.
The way I believe it goes is that moderation tools are a bit weak and the admins are time limited, so if someone you invite does something a bit.. silly.. then it becomes a mark against you.
If another person you invite does something drastic: then you're probably going to be banned.
Thus: the culture becomes pretty insular.
It has pro's and cons, but I can understand why people would assume it's elitist. I only got an invite because I know someone with an account there that would vouch for me.
I'd be open to vouch for you but for obvious reasons I don't give out invitations to just anybody.
The way I believe it goes is that moderation tools are a bit weak and the admins are time limited, so if someone you invite does something a bit.. silly.. then it becomes a mark against you.
If another person you invite does something drastic: then you're probably going to be banned.
Thus: the culture becomes pretty insular.
It has pro's and cons, but I can understand why people would assume it's elitist. I only got an invite because I know someone with an account there that would vouch for me.
I'd be open to vouch for you but for obvious reasons I don't give out invitations to just anybody.
I appreciate the sentiment, but as I alluded to in my comment the reason I gave up wasn’t really the invite system, at least not primarily. Observing some of the discussions that were held on IRC I just didn’t like the vibe. I wish I could be more specific but unfortunately too much time has passed for me to have any concrete examples.
If you just want to ask questions, serverfault would be a good start.
/r/msp /r/netsec /r/sysadmin
There’s a decent winadmins community on discord
Come join us here
https://winadmins.io
https://aka.ms/winadmins
/r/sysadmin is not bad.
Lobste.rs is a lot more diverse than just sysadmin stuff. But I find lurking on there more sysadmin-related stuff is posted than I see on the frontpage here.
For the most part, the people you're looking for aren't here, they're on Twitter or Slack. The chatops and devopschat slacks are decent. On Twitter there are tons of great people to follow. My short list is @littleidea, @purpleidea, @yesthattom, @allspaw, @botchagalupe, @damonedwards, @bejammingh, @miah_, @netik, @realgenekim, @jezhumble, @bryanl, @antonbabenko, @brikis98, @sigje, @philiph, @phredmoyer, @mipsytipsy, @lizthegrey, @KrisBuytaert, @nathenharvey, @srhtcn, @gethash, @bridgetkromhout, @patrickdebois, @hashicorp, @pulumi, @ lkanies, @adamhjk, @ripienaar, @garethr
Hope this helps a bit.
Hope this helps a bit.
Fellow sysadmins: what’s your favorite alternative to HN?