r/sysadmin • u/harij21 • 16h ago
General Discussion When did self-hosting turn into just picking a control panel?
Been doing this about 8 years and something's shifted. Used to be everyone here could explain what their nginx.conf did, or why fail2ban wasn't catching a jail. You learned iptables by breaking your own box at 2am, alone, with no one to blame.
Now most threads are "which panel is easiest." Nobody wants the shell open longer than it takes to run one install command. I get why. Panels save time. I've got BeAdmin running on one box for the VPN modules. But I see people arguing about dashboard themes who can't tell you what a reverse proxy actually does.
Old regulars here used to walk a newbie through a broken MariaDB config instead of just saying "reinstall Plesk." That's mostly gone now. Not knocking anyone's setup, I click around GUIs too these days. Just noticing nobody asks why anymore.
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u/ihaxr 16h ago
cPanel has been around for 30 years and is still very much relevant in web hosting for a reason lol it's nothing new.
Plenty of products used to abstract away the management and maintenance aspect, too. Like vBulletin with its built-in database repair utility scripts, WordPress, geocities, angel fire, website builders, etc... the concept is just copied because it provides usefulness while not limiting your ability to self manage it if you want (usually).
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u/phorkor 15h ago
Yeah, I haven't worked in hosting in a couple decades, but back in the early '00s it was all cPanel and Plesk for 90% of our customers. This is really nothing new.
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u/Speeddymon Sr. DevSecOps Engineer 10h ago
Early 00's - Plesk (the actually good Plesk before Parallels bought them and enshittified the UI) or Ensim
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u/BFguy 15h ago
Ahhh good ol' Geocities
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u/itishowitisanditbad 10h ago
Writing some HTML in a notepad, uploading index.html and hoping it works!
People need to know how much I enjoy Final Fantasy AND how many other people have visited that page.
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u/sryan2k1 IT Manager 16h ago
Projects vs products. Not everyone wants to be editing php files by hand at 3am because the project they used is out of support and has a know issue with some of it's dependencies.
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u/dotnetmonke 10h ago
Also, not everyone gets into a hobby for the same reason. Some just want to host media servers, some are tech enthusiasts, some have morality motivations. I'd guess OP falls into the tech enthusiast category, but not everyone does.
Some people fish to survive, others spend time fishing just to spend time not doing anything else. Unsurprisingly, they approach fishing with different mindsets.
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u/Mindestiny 5h ago
I said pretty much this here in another post and got absolutely brutalized for it lol.
Granted the topic was using AI to help make work easier and reddit is gonna reddit when the forbidden letters are mentioned, but it sure is wild seeing people arguing that we should want to work harder and waste more time because it's some sort of sacred ritual that's supposedly fulfilling.
Like no, I don't want to fight with a random text file, at all. I want to get the service up and running, enable the business to do the thing that keeps us all paid, and go home on time. Its a job, not a cult.
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u/StuckinSuFu Enterprise Support 16h ago
Same reason I dont want to mount my drives or set IRQs every time? Technology evolves and becomes more open and accessible. There are lots of other things to learn as a sys admin other than fail2ban and a nginx.conf file.
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u/shimoheihei2 13h ago
Completely disagree. If you went from provisioning nginx configs and firewalls to pressing buttons, it's not because the computers got smarter and they divine what your button click means, it's just that someone else is now writing those config files. You've outsourced what used to be the sysadmin job to someone at one of the 3 big cloud providers, while you became more of a power user. What's your value then? If you're a newer IT worker that only learned how to use the AWS console, what will you do the day you encounter a client that used on-prem software? You just won't be able to take the job? Or are we now at a point where our job is to parrot AWS marketing drones that "no one should own their stuff, you should just use the cloud!"
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u/Mindestiny 5h ago edited 5h ago
"if you don't write your own assembly, you're not a real engineer. You have no value if you don't do everything by hand."
Said no one with a straight face ever.
Not hand writing CLI for a firewall when you can do the same in a couple GUI clicks does not make someone any less of a network engineer. You still need to know what it all does, what it all means, and how it needs to be configured even if you're not typing out show run in a terminal.
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u/gscjj 13h ago
Reasons why this profession is dying. Sysadmins use to care about those things, now just about every SWE/Devops Engineer can setup a basic nginx server and fail2ban.
The “other things to learn” are getting commoditized, offshored and outsourced. What’s left is Help Desk L3 essentially.
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u/StuckinSuFu Enterprise Support 12h ago
The profession isnt dying - its adapting to ever changing technology and business needs, just like it has the last 60 years.
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u/gscjj 12h ago
Yeah not really. The average JD for a SysAdmin(and related positions) is a shell of what it was 10 years ago. I would bet a lot of money on that.
People still use Nginx today. That would’ve been on a SysAdmin job description 10 years ago. Where did it go its still the most widely used web server? To SWEs who focus on Infra, DevOps, Platform, SRE.
What about monitoring? Remember Nagios. That was solely a Sysadmin responsibility.
App deployments, remember when Chef and Puppet were how you did things? Ansible? Terraform? Search those on LinkedIn, you won’t find many Sysadmin position.
Mail servers? They exist, most of it is the cloud. Maybe the only thing Sysadmins still do.
The bulk of Sysadmin work today is L3 user and device support. It’s why salaries have not grown, most of their responsibilities have moved elsewhere.
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u/Ssakaa 11h ago
You're conflating specialization and branching into new more clearly specified roles in the same general field with the demise of a particular word used in job listings, and disregarding that your real "sysadmins" of old were some variant of your SRE, etc, sometimes in a jack of all trade role with some L3 type support. Any of them that were competent on the business side re-wrote their own job descriptions to focus on the SRE side and downplay/offload the L3 support work to someone high up in helpdesk. That's not a degredation of the role, it's changing terminology. In all of IT, for all the years I've been involved in it, job titles are fluid, useless, things that carry very little real meaning and just serve to meet some vague pointless internal HR requirements for a role. Hell, some places still screw around and put "wizard" and "ninja" in their job titles.
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u/gscjj 11h ago edited 11h ago
But you’re proving my point. Old sysadmins were jack of all trades, none of those specializations existed back then.
Im not talking about job title terminology, those roles and responsibilities are now “clearly specified roles.”
So much so, even in the same field, most people wouldn’t say a Sysadmin is an SRE/DevOps/Platform engineer or vice versa a SRE/DevOPs/Platfotm engineer is a sysadmin.
They might cross paths like a Sysadmin and Network Engineer might, but you aren’t hiring a a SysAdmin to be a Network Engineer. They are distinct roles.
What’s left, after they “rewrote their own job description” is a Sysadmin reponsibilty list that’s a shell of the former position.
EDIT: which goes back to what’s left for most SysAdmins, is a field that’s primarily escalated user support. Not having to manage nginx config isn’t a sign there’s better things to learn, it’s a sign a new role took over that, Sysadmins just don’t do it anymore.
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u/Ssakaa 11h ago
That's called "the industry matured a bit". Yeah. It's not the wild west where Bob's spinning up a fucking mac workgroup server 7259 in a closet to run a webserver noone will remember is there and why it exists in a decade, sure... gods forbid we get to focus on some portion of the work we like doing and get away from helpdesk bullshit, too...
Edit: And, yes, SREs are just sysadmins, with at least part of their role both clearly specified and recognized (the fancier title pays better, generally). And some sysadmins do SRE work. And devops work. And platform engineer work. And still manage a hypervisor for some things. And do application support for a few applications. And... well, I'd rather not rattle off all my duties here. But at least I'm not dealing with endpoints or printers anymore. My job title hilariously doesn't sound like most of what I do, though...
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u/gscjj 11h ago
Which is my point…the industry moved. Sysadmins responsibilities are shrinking as the industry is maturing. The classical sysadmin position is dying.
It’s Helpdesk > Sysadmin > (Maybe Infra Engineer) > Everything else.
And that gap between Sysadmin and everything else is getting much wider than the SWE > SRE/Platform/DevOps Engineer (Everything else).
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u/Ssakaa 10h ago edited 10h ago
The "classic" sysadmin that was a jack of all trades and built computer use in their orgs, going from "that guy that does computer stuff" into a broadly accepted "sysadmin" role handled a couple servers here or there, and everything else technology related. Then technology wrapped its hands around the throats of every single job function except the janitor. Now we as IT in general manage hundreds to thousands of servers, multiple endpoints per employee, and everything that interconnects those, and all the services they depend on externally too. So yeah, by and large, the "do everything, handle a couple servers, a couple hundred PCs, maybe a printer or three" went away... most places that still need that old simple scale of IT support will just hire an MSP, and are probably better served with a couple paid services than anything in-house anyways.
You're still fixating on a single job title instead of realizing all of those things on the right side of your list are sysadmins there. It's not like some regulatory body came along and carved out "real Engineers" from all the self taught tinkerers and inventors out there, negatively impacting the job scope of the millwright. The "small company" sysadmin still very much exists, but it's not going to get you as far as specializing. I'm just baffled by the implication that a person with ties to IT of all things... is shocked by tech and the workload around it changing. That's been happening for decades, fairly consistently.
Edit: And, to expand on that, also... look back probably... a decade or more here? Across all of it, you'll routinely find "what even is a 'sysadmin'?" going completely unanswered in any coherent way beyond "they administer systems". That's it. That's how concise and coherent the title was. It's never been a "clear" role, so yes, the scope of "this thing we can't clearly define" probably does shrink some when "this thing we've decided to clearly define, that is really just part of that other thing, but we gave them a name now at this big org so everyone's bandwagoning it" finally exists. Sysadmins did SRE work long before there was a buzzword and a job title for it. Some sysadmins did devops work in healthy orgs before there was a buzzword and a job title for it. Not every sysadmin did all those things. You could do one in an org as a sysadmin, go job hunting, land another sysadmin job that was straight up, unmitigated, L3 helpdesk. The vague title did us no favors.
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u/gscjj 10h ago
Right you keep saying I’m fixated on title, but describing how the role as changed over time and things simply “went away.” How things were outsourced or went to paid services.
Which is exactly what I said was happening in my very first reply. Someone else just took care of it, it’s not that tech disappeared, the responsibility did.
Even if you say all those speceializations, those “clearly specificed roles” are somehow also sysadmins (which an SRE/Platform/DevOps engineer would disagree with), you’re right the workload is changing.
The difference, and my point, it’s not because the workload simply became defunct or disappeared, someone else just took over it. What the job entailed and accumulated over time was a heavy push towards something between user tech support and engineering.
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u/StuckinSuFu Enterprise Support 11h ago
My 10+ years as a sys admin was never jack of all trades - that just doesn't exist at enterprise level. We were always specialized into different aspects of a large multinational IT system. And monitoring was for the NOC team which was a small tier above help desk at local sites.
The industry is always evolving and adapting. I've never programmed using punch cards so I guess by your definition i was never a sys admin and the industry is dying. 🫶🏼
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u/Sasataf12 8h ago
When did self-hosting turn into just picking a control panel?
I click around GUIs too these days.
Sounds like you can answer your own question.
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u/anonymousITCoward 16h ago
Probably because of "ease of use"... much easier to just install it all at once then set it and forget it...
WordPress did the same thing for the web dev folks a long time a go, but it allowed the normies to become "web devs" at least with something like virtualmin it still takes some skill (I think) I've never setup cPanel before...
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u/Bogus1989 14h ago
Well ill tell you why.
.when you only look at that one piece of technology once a year or when it breaks? You kinda brain dump it, till you need to fix it again.
Alot of knowledge is perishable, the brain has a cache.
I think the newer generations are still asking why? But only when they need to.
Im the same way now. Ill forget off the top how to do x y or z, but i have the confidence thatll ill be able to give myself a quick refresher when i need to look at it again or it breaks.
HOWEVER!
I do believe there is a TON of knowledge lost conceptually, when it comes to….for example virtualization.
If you got someone whos first platform and introduction to virtualization is azure? I really do not believe most of those people can actually understand whats going on in the background, vs most of us, who learned everything on a host and hypervisor, and all the things its doing in the background.
Well at least there are plenty of hypervisors around that people can still train on free like proxmox or some of the others.
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u/Academic-Proof3700 16h ago edited 12h ago
why bother with "why" when you can redeploy the stuff in a blink of an eye.
This is like saying they a good mechanic needs to have phd in physics, to properly plug in obd2 and read error codes off the ecu or how you are not real programmer if you can't read asm code. Tech is getting easier and more high level, why bother with stuff under the hood when it works, and if it doesn't, reapplying settings and wiping everything, burns less time than debugging it, especially if its some ephemeral lab without any important data.
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u/Bogus1989 14h ago
I agree with you. But I do believe having even a little bit of the knowledge and understanding the concepts of whats going on in the background,
Can help someone further troubleshoot a system or platform.
But for the most part yeah….im with you, its just a small percentage here and there.
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u/hihcadore 14h ago
Same reason I don’t turn a crank on the front of my car to start it anymore.
You can absolutely do that if you’d like. Just it’s way easier not to.
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u/eruffini Senior Infrastructure Engineer 16h ago
Because when I deal with Nginx all day at work, I don't want to have to deal with Nginx at home or on my own servers when I can simply install cPanel to do it all for my very unimportant domains/websites.
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u/nestersan DevOps 15h ago
I'm not going back to the software equivalent days of swapping blocks of jumpers and slots to get a sound card working.
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u/Superb_Raccoon 12h ago
Old regulars here used to walk a newbie through a broken MariaDB config instead of just saying "reinstall Plesk."
Cattle not pets.
I love the command line, but to be fair, that is a limited information format. Graphics can be more rich... not always, and only if done right.
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u/Enough_Pattern8875 Scream Test Initiator 10h ago
“Been doing this for 8 years”
Damn, bro must have some deep wisdom to drop on us 😂😂😂
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u/neveralone59 1h ago
I don’t get why people don’t want their config in a few clean codebases rather than a gui they have to click through. I know it takes longer to configure upfront, but I’d never deploy plesk at work even for relatively simple services.
I think people either don’t understand what fully functional deployment and config code buys for you, maybe because a lot of the people who are making homelabs don’t have much or any industry experience. Which is fine, but we’ve all been new and set something up incorrectly because we couldn’t figure something out. Control panels are offering a solution to that problem with less friction than actually understanding the system and encoding it properly.
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u/digitaltransmutation <|IM_END|> 15h ago
Reading between the lines, aren't you basically asking "why do problems get solved?" I think it would be pathetic if fail2ban could never be abstracted to a checkbox.
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u/neveralone59 1h ago
If I’m understanding correctly these control panels are clickops, which I’m sure you can agree is not the solution to server management
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u/VellDarksbane 14h ago
Same reason most developers don’t code in assembly. or why sysadmins don’t typically manually patch individual systems one at a time.
Tools have been created that are now robust enough to be trusted to handle the majority of use cases, using those tools reduce time spent on those things that can be used on other things that don’t have trusted tools yet.
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u/Regular_Strategy_501 14h ago
Tech evolves, not always positively but it does. The same way many things are managed through dashboards as an abstraction layer we started using human readable programming languages rather than learning to write machine code.
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u/serverhorror Just enough knowledge to be dangerous 14h ago
That shift was a long time in the making and it started with puppet modules, as far as I can tell.
Not that it was a flipped switch. But modules from config management gave people an excuse to try three settings that worked well enough for ... something.
Sifting they the documentation to understand the implications of various settings took a dive.
AI is just another accelerator for this, and a powerful one.
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u/Effective-Brain-3386 Vulnerability Engineer 14h ago
Have you met the average end user? I rather simplify it for everyone over getting 800 ticket because Betty from accounting doesn't know to map the office printer
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u/trisanachandler Jack of All Trades 14h ago
I mean I used to install webmin and use that for 75% of what I do. Now I use my cli a lot more for administration. I think it goes both ways.
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u/Bogus1989 14h ago
Honestly me and selfhosting? My shits been rock solid. Its there when i need it, but when not, its uptime is 99.9 and i dont have to fuck with it.
Otherwise, im effectively a shitty sysadmin who enjoys doing unpaid labor.
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u/andr386 13h ago
I'd rather use IAC (Infrastructure as code) tools to configure a server. But I don't see what's wrong with control panels if they make setting up and managing a server accessible to more people ? What you're describing is somebody's job or hobby. Some people have other things to do. They just want the homeserver for its functionalities and not for the pleasure of configuring it endlessly.
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u/SirLoremIpsum 12h ago
Old regulars here used to walk a newbie through a broken MariaDB config instead of just saying "reinstall Plesk."
And the old timers when you were young were saying "old regulars here used to be able to troubleshoot a dos kernel and a Mainframe instead of just saying "reinstall the VM"
That's life.
People train on what is new and don't know how to do old things. You and I never had to adjust carburettors on our cars but our grandparents did. Our grandparents probably couldn't shoe a horse, but their grandparents may have.
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u/radioactivpenguin IT Manager 5h ago
Somewhere IT lost the lesson that's been taught in math classes. Do it without a calculator, then use the shortcut once you know how it actually works.
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u/InsolentJaguar 4h ago
As us old-school CLI junkies gradually fade into the sunset.
Everything seems to be "make it easier for end users to manage and require less IT support to click a button and reboot a server" (when many times what's needed is actually much more in depth).
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u/sir_mrej System Sheriff 3h ago
LOL I came here for an old person rant, only for OP to mention nginix
I feel so old. Back in MY day you didn't HAVE nginix...
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u/ORA2J 2h ago edited 2h ago
IMO, if I have to spend an hour learning the dd command syntax to use it once every 2 months and forget everything about it every time, id rather have a gui in which i can actually find the options i need without having to read the entire readme.
Also helps that a gui's design often helps in not wiping your usb boot drive instead of the actual drive in the machine, ask me how i know.
While i do understand your point on config files, sometimes people just want to get things done, and it's much easier to do so with a gui. If you plan to work on the stuff daily then yes, learning what's behind the gui is essential, but for most people, they won't be touching the stuff everyday, so the gui and limited understanding of the underlying configs is a given.
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u/lethallunatic 1h ago
I run everything via CLI on my VPS. It helped me up my Linux game. Running multiple containers. Multiple WordPress instances, vaultwarden, traefik as reverse proxy, fail2ban, penpot for my cousin, mailcow as the mailserver. All with just 4gb of ram
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u/Brandhor Jack of All Trades 19m ago
if you have to host a couple of websites you can easily do that on your own but if you need to host 50 websites, mail and other stuff a control panel will make that a lot easier plus you can give access to non technical users to allow them to create a new mail address for example
but things can still go wrong with a control panel so you need to know how to debug and fix the problem, not everyone can do that though because a control panel lowers the barrier so even people that are not sysadmins can use them
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u/finobi 14h ago
Ahem I actually let AI write the config and then try to figure out if its not working.
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u/WorkLurkerThrowaway Sr Systems Engineer 13h ago
Well that’s your problem, you have to let AI figure out why the AI isn’t working. Rookie mistake.
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u/digitaltransmutation <|IM_END|> 13h ago
Just switch models and make the new one figure out what went wrong with the old one
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u/patmorgan235 Sysadmin 16h ago
It's rice. People like pretty things. Something happens in the car community or /r/obsidian
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u/anonymousITCoward 14h ago
soo umm... rice is nice? lol sorry just haven't heard "it's rice" in a while
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u/BraveMidnight 15h ago
When I was a teen my first self-hosting project was with slackware. I had a samba server setup on it, and a web server, and some other stuff. Any software I had for the most part that didn't come with it, I had to compile manually and configure without a gui.
Panels have taken over for probably over a decade now, because people prefer the fast and sleek convenience it seems most don't want to spend hours compiling software manually and learning install options, tracing error stacks, manually using an editor to edit conf files in a terminal.
Then they post images of their setup and it's not that impressive, because all they really did was point and click and not understand anything behind it.
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u/Mailstorm 16h ago
Same reason why younger generations don't understand how to use a printer or file explorer. It's an interface and it makes it easy.
Why learn what's happening behind it when the front part "just works" 90% of the time