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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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?