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Re:The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers by toyg on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @08:52AM (#9419981)
> But it isn't all that hard to understand a clean Unix. I have never copied or typed a command that I don't understand.

Well, good for you. I can assure you that it's not the case for almost anyone who approached Linux after the likes of Mandrake were released and/or tried to make it work on anything different from a traditional server.

I'm all for trying to understand what one is doing (and I wholeheartedly agree with TFA's point), but the reality is that very few people in the world really understand all intricacies of one's operating system. This does not excuse poor security practices, but it explains their background.

Re:The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers by Twirrim on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @09:27AM (#9420194)
That's why you get someone who is capable of understanding it.

You wouldn't hire some high school kid who's just about taught themselves HTML by reading a book for a week, and get them to write your web application from ground up. You'd hire someone who knows what they're doing. Why is it seen as any different for Operations work? There is a reason systems administration is a skilled field, and a reason they're paid on a par with developers.

Re:The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers by redblacktree on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @09:57AM (#9420412)
I think the reason this happens less and less is that sysadmins are cost centers, not revenue generators. When you have developers do that work (poorly or not), you don't have a group that's purely cost. Those costs get hidden in the development group.
Re:The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers by stephenr on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @10:12AM (#9420521)
Whoops replied to wrong comment!

However yes the issue of a team that "doesn't make money" is very real. Maybe you it should be "marketed" like legal or accounting: it doesn't make money, it saves money caused by SNAFUBAR situations.

Re:The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers by acveilleux on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @11:26AM (#9421100)
Indeed, the costs merely get hidden and a lot of system decisions boil down to one of:

1. I saw it done that way in some blog.

2. We did it like that at my last job.

3. Seems like it works.

Re:The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers by sshconnection on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @11:34AM (#9421159)
That high school kid needs to install a web server. Is he going to hire someone? No. He's going to copy a curl command.
Re:The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers by subway on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @07:11PM (#9424165)
I expect her to say "How do I install software on this platform?" "Oh! /(apt|yum|dnf)/!"

/(apt-get|yum|dnf) install (apache2|httpd|nginx|lighttpd)/

Re:The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers by c22 on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @12:40PM (#9421647)
It's probably okay for him.
Re:The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers by danieldk on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @09:29AM (#9420219)
I'm all for trying to understand what one is doing (and I wholeheartedly agree with TFA's point), but the reality is that very few people in the world really understand all intricacies of one's operating system.

One of the problems (as I tried to argue) is that most Unices have become far more complex. The question is if the extra complexity is warranted on a server system, especially if bare Unix (OpenBSD serves as a good example here) was not that hard to understand.

Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean that we should look back. Another possibility would be to deploy services as unikernels (see Mirage OS) that use a small, thin, well-understood library layer on top of e.g. Xen, so that there isn't really an exploitable operating system underneath.