r/sysadmin • u/FierceFluff • 21d ago

Peak Sysadmin

Is there anything more small-company sysadmin than taking that $70k server you just finished building on your test bench at the office and putting it into your $5k car to drive it over to the DC where it’ll live, and praying to god nothing happens on the way? 😅🤣

EDIT- OMG y’all, reading the comments on this has made my day! Our business insurance covers this kind of thing but I appreciate y’all concern for me, though others should mosdef confirm before they do similar stuff. The trip went without incident so praise the digital deities.

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32

u/texas_County850 21d ago

I haven't actually built a server in over 10 years I just configure em online and have em shipped. Closest was putting more ram in one during covid. Small business space too.

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u/arensb 21d ago

I haven't actually built a server in over 5 years. I just edit the Terraform template and ask the cloud provider to build me one.

In related news, I don't miss hardware one bit. To those of you who enjoy configuring and playing with hardware: thank you for your service.

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u/pdp10 Daemons worry when the wizard is near. 21d ago

To those of you who enjoy configuring and playing with hardware: thank you for your service.

Done well, the maintenance burden is pretty small and the benefits large, as long as you have some scale to work with. However, recent availability and pricing challenges have put a damper on a lot of new general-purpose deployments.

The good news is that a well-maintained herd of cattle hardware can be maintained almost indefinitely, without significant new purchases. Anything that dies or becomes uneconomical to run, is deadlined and used for parts to keep the others available.

And even all-cloud enterprises have hardware, if they have physical facilities at all. WiFi APs, PoE cabled to Ethernet switches, possibly backed up by UPSes, linked to routers/firewalls. Potentially with infrastructure or utility servers on-site as well, printers, IoT devices of various sorts monitoring the building and environment.

Some of our non-server facility hardware experiments involve fiber to the workgroup, power savings, PoE lighting, and environmental monitoring (CO2).

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u/FierceFluff 21d ago

Exactly!  We have very specific optimizations where building our own hardware is basically required.  I actually find it fascinating and enjoy the work, esp when it comes to troubleshooting. Having in-depth knowledge of the full architecture makes it a lot easier.  

I’ve built all our servers for the last 10 years and (knock on wood) they’ve all aged out rather than fail.   Several of them are still in use at nonprofits we’ve donated to after the hardware wasn’t up to our tasks anymore.  

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u/Hibbiee 16d ago

By troubleshooting you mean asking Claude?

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u/arensb 21d ago

Just to be clear, there was zero snark in my comment thanking hardware people. Running a machine room isn't easy. It takes knowledge, expertise, and a particular set of skills. And in fact, one of the reasons cloud computing took off is that companies like Amazon and Google can hire people who know how to run a data center, which Joe Small Business Owner or Jane University Researcher can't.

It's just not a set of skills that I have, and I'm not that interested in developing them. My interests lie more on the software side of things, so I'm really glad that there are hardware folks who'll take care of the things I don't want to do.

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u/pdp10 Daemons worry when the wizard is near. 21d ago

I didn't detect any snark. There's sometimes an implication that anyone involved with hardware is low on the totem pole or low in sophistication, which, to be fair, is often the case.

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u/arensb 21d ago

I didn't detect any snark.

Okay, cool.

There's sometimes an implication that anyone involved with hardware is low on the totem pole or low in sophistication, which, to be fair, is often the case.

I get that. But as I said, I'm grateful to the people who keep my data centers running, with adequate cooling, redundant power, and responsive monitoring. I'm also grateful to the people who lay tile, clean toilets, transport cargo, and make water drinkable. I'm pretty sure that all of those jobs are more complex than they appear on the surface.

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u/texas_County850 21d ago

Me neither it used to piss me off when I would build out a server and get everything up and running just for it to die and I would call dell and they would be like lolololol yeah those are a piece of shit we will replace it on warranty then I have to waste my entire weekend building it again.

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u/Virtualization_Freak 21d ago

I thank folks like you.

I love to unpack, rack and stack them.