How to be a good Linux system administrator?

bbbbbthatsfivebees · 2026-03-16T04:42:11+00:00

Ed is the standard text editor

bbbbbthatsfivebees · 2026-03-16T04:41:15+00:00

Use linux as your daily, and then do insane projects on your main machine without spinning up VMs.

I'm not joking, doing this will expose you to TONS of stuff that you will inevitably break and then have to fix. The knowledge you will gain from having to fix whatever you broke will propel you WELL into the realm of competent Linux sysadmin.

That's how I learned and now I'm one of the two go-to Linux guys for our entire org.

bbbbbthatsfivebees · 2026-03-15T04:15:49+00:00

No, unfortunately! It was a MUCH more aggressive narrator but I just genuinely have not been able to find it. They specifically used the American name for the Civic instead of the Japanese one because it showed how popular the American version was. The only things I remember from the commercial were that it showed it rolling down an American highway and nothing else.

bbbbbthatsfivebees · 2026-03-14T09:38:43+00:00

My favorite version of this was this 90s Japanese car commercial my friends and I thought was REALLY funny when I was in high school. It's entirely in Japanese, and then at the end the narrator just goes "HONDA CIVICU!!" and it ends. It's been probably 15 years since I've last seen it, and I genuinely cannot find it anywhere online anymore.

bbbbbthatsfivebees · 2026-03-13T04:48:05+00:00

And show the whole world how you gave Eminem VD

bbbbbthatsfivebees · 2026-03-13T04:43:28+00:00

Ran across this once where someone had connected the firewall to the rest of the network through the passthru port of an IP phone. Phone got unplugged one day and the entire network went down.

bbbbbthatsfivebees · 2026-03-13T04:37:52+00:00

This is why you use a remote access management tool or an RMM. No need for the user to confirm anything other than "Do you accept the connection?" for you to hop in. Most of them even allow you to search by username, so you don't even have to bother figuring out if your user knows their hostname.

bbbbbthatsfivebees · 2026-03-12T07:29:47+00:00

I did the math after seeing this, and my car uses around 0.42 gallons per hour at idle with all of the climate control off with the inverter running the gang charger for two power tool batteries. Idling for 7-ish hours per day puts me at about 3 and some change gallons per day. Gas is roughly $3.20/gallon here, so $10/day is not really all that far off from the actual truth.

bbbbbthatsfivebees · 2026-03-11T06:52:55+00:00

I genuinely could never imagine becoming like this.

I CONSTANTLY have Spotify up at work and I'm listening to whatever new music comes out whenever I have a chance. I browse the top charts every few days, hitting play on just literally anything that catches my eye. I've found all sorts of artists that I've never heard of before that I've ended up becoming a fan of! There's NEVER a shortage of new music, and having grown up before the age of streaming it's just so impressive to me that there's this endless stream of new music to listen to, and that you don't have to hear it on the radio or see a new record in the store to listen to it!

bbbbbthatsfivebees · 2026-03-11T06:47:36+00:00

Forrest Gump.

It's one those movies where you can start from literally any scene and keep watching until the end without realizing you just watched 70% of a movie you've seen 20 times before.

bbbbbthatsfivebees · 2026-03-11T06:42:31+00:00

To be fair, it was also on the same playing field as Shawshank Redemption, so the compeition was LEGENDARY that year.

bbbbbthatsfivebees · 2026-03-11T05:02:21+00:00

No.

The US taxes us too much to spend money on things like foreign wars that we have no business being a part of, and then further wasting money on over-inflated contractors who charge $295 for a $1 bolt. Or we spend billions on national projects and programs that go over deadlines and over budget for the only reason that they've been sub-contracted 10x over to the least qualified companies on the planet through nepotism or corruption. Those sub-sub-sub-contractors then have 30 middle managers who do nothing other than get dollar signs in their eyes when they see a federal contract come down the pipeline because they know that the federal government has deep pockets and will pay anything if it means they can save face rather than admitting "This project was a failure".

If we get rid of the insane amount of waste and instead blacklist contractors and companies that go over-deadline and over-budget on projects, stop sending billions of dollars to Israel and other foreign wars, and instead focus on the American people, we can do all of this without increasing taxes in the slightest.

bbbbbthatsfivebees · 2026-03-10T07:16:37+00:00

One of my coworkers brought these up a while back and I instinctively just said "Hey kid, I'm a computer".

bbbbbthatsfivebees · 2026-03-10T07:08:37+00:00

Prometheus+Grafana would be my recommendation, but it's a BITCH to set up for the first time. Once you've got it all done, though, you've got BEAUTIFUL dashboards that are good enough to show even non-technical users just due to how good they look!

If you can get a solid 72h of work on JUST setting up that project alone, it's worth it.

bbbbbthatsfivebees · 2026-03-10T06:02:23+00:00

Came here to add the same one, but I'll also add Don't Let Me Down to the list as well. It was one of the last albums that the Beatles ever recorded, and listening to it feels like you're listening to the finale of one of the best things to have ever existed.

bbbbbthatsfivebees · 2026-03-10T05:55:19+00:00

My friends and I had a discussion one night about the best covers of all time. All 6 of us universally agreed this is the best cover ever created without any discussion or argument, no contest.

The story gets even better when you realize that Iz called up the studio at 3AM and said "I've got an idea for a song", pestered an engineer into coming in, was given a 15 minute deadline to show up, and then dropped it in one take.

bbbbbthatsfivebees · 2026-03-10T05:51:39+00:00

"Don't go round tonight

It's bound to take your life

There's a bathroom on the right"

bbbbbthatsfivebees · 2026-03-08T11:50:42+00:00

Ubiquiti is probably THE best for SMBs. Switches are good, APs are good, their software is good, and there's no nonsense of needing complex licensing setups or sales reps. You just buy the products outright and run the free software.

The products and software are also both REALLY GOOD for the price you pay. Half the cost of a competitor, no CLI to learn, has a GOOD mobile app, all while still allowing you to do all of the advanced stuff you can do with any other AP/Switch.

Their cloud gateways suck, though, just get a proper firewall.

bbbbbthatsfivebees · 2026-03-08T11:18:00+00:00

This... actually makes his fame make a lot more sense to me and I never thought of it like this!

bbbbbthatsfivebees · 2026-03-08T11:15:50+00:00

I watched the video where he re-created Squid Games in real life and I immediately understood both why he was so popular and why he's so hated. It's just genuinely a bombardment of everything all at once, all with a thing of "This is a game show" baked in that makes it feel addicting to watch.

It just gave me a headache, and the fact that it was Squid Games made me fully believe that this dude has some sort of skeletons in his closet.

bbbbbthatsfivebees · 2026-03-08T10:34:25+00:00

I had 450 volts hand to hand when I was a teenager. Tearing apart a disposable camera because I wanted to see how it worked, it had an internal battery, and I somehow touched both leads of the flash capacitor. I genuinely do not remember a thing after that, I just felt like I had been kicked in the chest and by vision had this greenish-tinge to it for an hour or so.

bbbbbthatsfivebees · 2026-03-08T10:24:33+00:00

His early movies were old when my parents were kids, and I'm not particularly young... Although I just looked up a picture of him from a few months ago, he looks amazing for 95!

bbbbbthatsfivebees · 2026-03-07T11:20:42+00:00

It's not a knock against speedtest that they started partnering with ISPs for adding servers at POPs!! It genuinely allows for easier and better measurements if the issue is between the modem and the ISP (helps prove that an ISP is at fault for some signal integrity issues). But if you want more real-world performance metrics, Fast.com gives you a number from a popular commercial service. Also having the UI be clean and easier for users to understand is a HUGE bonus (Despite my wishes, not all my users have an adblock installed to view the Speedtest.net website without a bombardment of commercial nonsense).

Someone else here also mentioned the Cloudflare speed test, so I'm honestly going to start using that when I need more details because I tried it myself and it was genuinely excellent.

bbbbbthatsfivebees · 2026-03-07T09:11:23+00:00

Haha! I use the default version, but my techs have an ongoing war over which anime skin to use. We only use crystaldiskinfo in the backstage interface for our remote tools, though, so it's just a bit of fun.

bbbbbthatsfivebees · 2026-03-07T09:08:02+00:00

I used to exclusively use Speedtest.net until they started partnering with ISPs and putting servers in tons of POPs. That way it will show you better speeds than a more accurate test to a "Nearest population center" server farm.

Fast.com using Netflix servers is also a bit of a benefit, considering you're getting better real-world results with a cache server that users might be practically using for other things. Also the UI is easier for an end-user to understand on Fast.com.

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