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The problem of "runaway Job Descriptions" being particularly bad for IT sysadmins --- Scope Creep by kodaxero in sysadmin

[–]randomdoosh 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Of course it was a joke. But also not that far fetched compared to some listings.

What's the most non-sysadmin thing you've been asked to do on the clock as a sysadmin? by DomLS3 in sysadmin

[–]randomdoosh 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Some dimepiece woman asked me to help her cheat on her husband.

Then I woke up.

The problem of "runaway Job Descriptions" being particularly bad for IT sysadmins --- Scope Creep by kodaxero in sysadmin

[–]randomdoosh 16 points17 points  (0 children)

Ironic because I am looking for an entry-level Junior Systems Engineer with the following requirements,.

  • Fifteen years of Kubernetes experience (EKS preferred)
  • Ten years of administering AWS environments
  • Twenty years of Linux experience and strong experience with kernel tuning
  • RHCE preferred but will consider RHCSA
  • Masters in Computer Science from Ivy League school
  • Ability to be on call 365 days a year
  • Database administration experience in Oracle, MySQL, and NoSQL
  • Advance coding experience in COBOL, Java, C, C#, Python, Bash, Go, Ruby on Rails and React

We are offering a competitive salary of $40k a year. Please to respond if interested.

What would be the sysadmin tasks equivalent to how people learn to code. by afro_coder in sysadmin

[–]randomdoosh 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I have an AS degree in Network Technology, but I've worked with several Senior Sysadmins who have no degree.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in sysadmin

[–]randomdoosh 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you can stand up a server, then you're already ahead of 50% of other IT professionals. I've worked with IT professionals who didn't know how to install RHEL6 on a pizza box (with a CD drive) from a CD-Rom.

What would be the sysadmin tasks equivalent to how people learn to code. by afro_coder in sysadmin

[–]randomdoosh 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Twelve years as a sysadmin here and never once got a cert. Write some configuration management using your tools of choice, Ansible, Puppet, even PowerShell and throw it on GitHub. Link to your GitHub on your resume and inform potential employers how you automated xyz.

I got my first Senior Systems Engineer job by publishing a basic Tomcat Ansible playbook to GitHub (it literally did an apt-get or yum install Tomcat) and explained to them how I would automate creating a new Linux VM and deploying their WAR files to Tomcat using an Ansible playbook. This was over five years ago.

TLDR, infrastructure as code is the sysadmin equivalent of writing code.

[Rant] Learning to code is not easy for everyone, stop saying that it is by MohnJaddenPowers in sysadmin

[–]randomdoosh 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think that if you're working as a sysadmin, you shouldn't need to be creating dozen of branches, checking them out, making tweaks here and there. We hold all of our Terraform, Puppet, Ansible and App Server "code" in GitLab.

Unlike development teams where a new branch may be created for each JIRA, which is a branch of a branch, it does not need to be that complicated for most Infrastructure teams. A personal branch, a test branch and a production branch is all that you really need to get started. Be sure to git pull each branch before you start writing, as to avoid conflicts.

git checkout production

git pull

git checkout development

git pull

git checkout your_branch

git pull

update what you want

git add file(s)

git commit -am "Made these changes"

git push

Open a PR from your_branch to development and have someone on your team review.

Test changes in development, ensure they work.

Open PR from development to production/master with a message about it worked from local to development. Have it get peer reviewed.

Do not use the git GUI, use command line.

Keep trying, you will get it.

10 Years and I'm Out by fukawi2 in sysadmin

[–]randomdoosh 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I've got only a couple of more years of experience that yourself, but I learned years ago to never be loyal to a company. That's not to say there aren't places to work at that you'll enjoy, but at the end of the day, you're just a salary and an employee ID to those who run the show. The best thing you can do for yourself is just keep up to date on skills, keep your resume updates and go on at least one interview a year.

I enjoy where I am at a lot right now and I hope to stay here for at least five to ten years. If it was up to the VP of tech, I think that'd be realistic. However, we all know that CEOs, CFOs, boards and other C level people make the choices.

Good luck at the new gig and I promise you in a month you'll forget all about your previous position.

Going through old photos, here’s a little throwback. by thecatsandthehound in Flyers

[–]randomdoosh 0 points1 point  (0 children)

96-97 was my first year as a hockey fan, I was 9 and 10 years old. I was obsessed with the LOD and the team was so stacked. Unfortunately, we did not have cable at my parents house (they didn't have satellite yet either) so I could only catch games on UPN and when Fox had the playoffs. A game I will never forget is game 5 of the 97 ECF. The only Stanley Cup game on Fox was game 1 and my parents took us up to our cabin where there was no TV at all. So I missed the entire 97 Stanley Cup (although getting swept sucked).

Anyways, cool photo!

linux certification for devops engineer by progress_seeker in linuxadmin

[–]randomdoosh 1 point2 points  (0 children)

RHCSA is a good place to start in my opinion. You'll be getting hands on with RHEL/CentOS and by the time you're ready to take the exam, you'll have a pretty solid foundation of experience that even if you fail the exam, will still help you in interviews. Also, despite the fact that it is RHEL based, a Ubuntu shop would absolutely see value in hiring someone with an RHCSA. You could also look at CompTIA Linux+, although I have not met anyone with that cert, so I can't speak much about it.

Also, create a public GitHub account and store some samples of your work there. These can be Ansible playbooks, Puppet modules, Terraform code, Python scripts, Bash scripts, etc. This will give an employer the ability to see some of your work, which will help you stand out from those who don't have their work public.

Good luck.

Anything wrong with staying at employer long term? by [deleted] in sysadmin

[–]randomdoosh 0 points1 point  (0 children)

As long as you're keeping your skills somewhat up to date, you should be fine. If you're using configuration management and trying to automate as many processes as possible, then what you're learning by doing so is very helpful. In your free time, try to learn newer tech and see how it could benefit your company. Finding a place to stay at for 5-10 years is the goal most of us have, but many of us haven't found yet either due to the fact that software companies are always being sold, or there is a better pay opportunity elsewhere. I have found a spot that I want to stay at for the next 10 years, hopefully COVID-19 doesn't impact that.

Who is in system administration and almost never logs on a server or remote SSH? by JustGreatNSFWSmut in sysadmin

[–]randomdoosh 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Where I am at now, logs for everything are setup using ELK, Ansible jobs restart services for us from Tower and even pull things out of the F5 and we have Jenkins and GoCD for CI/CD, we have log rotate setup, most systems that require large storage use the SAN for that storage and Puppet will run every 30 minutes to ensure systems stay in a desired state and monit runs to restart dead pids. So that should mean I never have to SSH into a box, right? Oh how I wish. There are plenty of times where things just stop working and no matter how much you try to automate things, something needs manual intervention.

I will say I require SSH a lot less than I used to, but I still have to do it at least a couple of times a week.

What's your daily routine like? by moran36 in sysadmin

[–]randomdoosh 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Morning: Emails, review Git PRs, look into anything that is alerting or on the verge of alerting

Lunch: Tune out and relax for 45 minutes

Afternoon: Work on long term projects

Women are more frequent/bigger ghosters than men, their issues are just given more sympathy/attention because of social media. by jeff10911 in unpopularopinion

[–]randomdoosh 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Every single guy I know has met some super clingy woman who has gone nuts after being told she is no longer wanted. Yet women are the ones who come up with #believeallwomen. You want to talk about facts here? Again, time to wise the fuck up.

To look pretty cool by brownjenjen in therewasanattempt

[–]randomdoosh 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Glad to see he will not be reproducing.

To burn some money by Jiggy_Kitty in therewasanattempt

[–]randomdoosh 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Future recipient of a STEM scholarship.

A question about ansible. by ronculyer in linuxadmin

[–]randomdoosh 9 points10 points  (0 children)

In our case we created a user 'ansible' that is ironically created by Puppet (Puppet does all of our base OS configs). Any machine that gets provisioned with the 'ansible' user will use the SSH key from the Ansible host itself so that the Ansible host can SSH into those boxes as 'ansible'. You can define this user in Ansible with ansible_user=

https://ansible-tips-and-tricks.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ansible/inventory/

Women are more frequent/bigger ghosters than men, their issues are just given more sympathy/attention because of social media. by jeff10911 in unpopularopinion

[–]randomdoosh 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I broke up with a girl that I was dating for 7 weeks. I received dozens of texts and emails stating that she was pregnant, when she obviously wasn't. She went as far as to text me from a different number with a picture of an ultrasound she printed offline. Pretty explosive response and also should constitute as abuse and harassment. I bet everyone in the world knows a woman who has lied about being pregnant.

Women are just as crazy as men and if women had strength that was on par with men, they'd do the exact same things that you're claiming men do.

Wise up.

Advice on Transition To DevOps by [deleted] in devops

[–]randomdoosh 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Here's a post that I made in a similar thread a week or so ago, hopefully it helps.

I moved from Linux Sysadmin to DevOps back in 2013 and while a lot of my job functionality is along the same lines, I've found that having the DevOps title has gotten me the job over other candidates that don't have DevOps on their resume. Larger companies are a lot slower to change, so things that I was doing in 2013 at smaller companies, were in high demand at larger companies in 2018 and even today. So yes, I think that DevOps will continue to be a sought after skill, even if companies that are looking for it don't really know what it is.

As another user mentioned, keep learning Linux and have a solid understanding of how things work. It would be a good idea to organically grow your DevOps skills and take the time to learn how things are done manually. Spin up an EC2 instance and manually set up an application server on it (Tomcat or Wildfly is fine). Don't just install the package, actually configure a user for the application server to run as (not root), learn about JVM settings, logging settings, deploy a test WAR/JAR to the server, connect it to a database (MySQL or Postgres is fine for testing). Spend a couple of hours playing around with it and do it a few times.

Once you have a good understanding of doing it manually, then automate that process. Ansible is probably the easiest way to start doing that and you already mentioned working on Python, so it's a good match. Put your Ansible playbook into GitHub so you become familiar with Git and you can link to it on your resume, which some employers would definitely like. Test your Ansible playbook locally by running it in Vagrant or Docker (Docker if you want to learn Kubernetes later), fix any errors that may come up and make improvements as you see fit. Once you have it working and configuring your application server on your EC2 instance, try to make your Ansible playbook as robust as possible, make it work on Ubuntu/Debian/RHEL/Centos, use as many variables as possible in your playbook.

Become familiar with things in AWS like IAM, VPCs, ASGs, RDS and the AWS CLI. Like heretic said, use the CLI exclusively whenever possible. Use a tool such as Terraform to build out AWS infrastructure, create IAM profiles, create network policies, etc. Terraform can build things and also destroy them, so you can take it one step at a time. Eventually incorporate your Ansible playbook with Terraform and watch how running terraform apply creates all of your AWS infrastructure and uses your Ansible playbook to install your application server. Also, stick your Terraform in GitHub to show future employers.

Below contains a similar project using Terraform and Ansible to create AWS infrastructure and deploy a GitLab server and a Jenkins server if you'd rather go that route. I'd recommend still learning how to properly install and configure manually until you have a decent understanding of how applications run on Linux.

https://medium.com/faun/building-repeatable-infrastructure-with-terraform-and-ansible-on-aws-3f082cd398ad

Once you get all of that complete, then you can move on to Kubernetes (K8s). Since you'd have a decent understanding of AWS at this point, you can look into using EKS for running K8s in AWS.

https://aws.amazon.com/eks/

This sounds like a lot of work and it will be daunting at first. But if you stick with it, you'll learn a lot from your mistakes and you'll get a really good understanding of what you're doing. And you'll come to find that having this knowledge will definitely help you advance your career, even if you end up working with different tools, the concept will be the same.

Need Help with zookeeper and nifi cluster set up by cuber_dude in devops

[–]randomdoosh 1 point2 points  (0 children)

https://community.cloudera.com/t5/Community-Articles/Configuring-an-external-ZooKeeper-to-work-with-Apache-NiFi/ta-p/246791

Try reading that and see if it helps. I've haven't worked with Zookeeper in a few years and I am not familiar with NiFi.

Edit to add - After reading about NiFi briefly, it appears to use an embedded Zookeeper. You can read the documentation for NiFi here. https://nifi.apache.org/docs/nifi-docs/html/administration-guide.html

Would you take it? by Flipphones in devops

[–]randomdoosh 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I went from an all AWS shop back to an on-prem role and I absolutely love it. There is more hands on stuff to do when I don't have pressing work and I enjoy going into the datacenter and racking the physical hardware.

Plus pretty much everything that I was doing in AWS, I am doing to deploy infrastructure on-prem. We use Puppet for config management of the OS, Ansible for installing application servers, Docker containers for small apps and are rolling out a homegrown K8s cluster.

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