Ask HN: “HN” for Sysadmins?
I absolutely love HN, but obviously it’s focused on webdev, startups, and programming. As a sysadmin, the majority of the content isn’t relevant to me professionally.
Fellow sysadmins: what’s your favorite alternative to HN?
78 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 147 ms ] threadUnfortunately 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.
But I can fully recommend it, the community is really good.
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.
Many sysadmins suffer from a snarky mentality (and I include myself in that)
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.
Being a bit more clickbaity and outright claiming something wrong does indeed bring out a lot of people out of their abodes.
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 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 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 :].
Hugely matter of perspective.
So, finding places for DevOps and SRE's is advised, as that's where most of the sysadmins are.
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.
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_.
"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
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.
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.
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 :)
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 do agree, however, that this coup has been successful, so using those search terms will probably result in what most SysAdmins are looking for.
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.
An HN for Sysadmins will probably be just another r/sysadmin.
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...
[1] - https://serverfault.com/
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?
How would you do that? Keyword matching jumps to mind, but did you have something else up your sleeve?
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
Hope this helps a bit.
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
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!?
It's in recovery.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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
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)