Straw man. I’m encountering sys admins and systems “engineers” who don’t know how to spec out a server, don’t understand how certificates work, don’t understand basic IP addressing principles, don’t understand basic networking topology.

They just know how to click a list of specific buttons in a GUI for one specific Corpo vendor.

Maybe that is fine for a Jr. Admin just starting out, but it isn’t what you want for the folks in charge of building, upgrading, and maintaining your company’s infrastructure.

There’s nothing wrong with making interfaces simpler and easier to understand. And there’s nothing wrong with building simplified abstractions on top of your systems to gain efficiency. But this should not be done at the cost of actual deep understanding and functionality.

The people you call when things go badly wrong will always be the folks that have that deep understanding and competency. It already has started hitting the developer community in the last few years. The Jr. Devs that did a 3 month boot camp where they learned nothing but how to parrot code and slap APIs together, are getting laid off and cannot find work.

The devs that went to school for Comp Sci, that have years of real world experience, and actually understand the theory and the nuts and bolts of the underlying tech, they are still largely employed and have little trouble finding work.

I think the same will happen soon in the IT world. Deep knowledge and years of dirty, greasy hands will always be desirable over a parrot that only knows how to click GUI buttons in a specific order.

Let’s hope that people will start to favor on-prem solutions and smaller independent cloud providers vs the massive trillion dollar corpo clouds that control so much now.

Very good read. I totally agree with your sentiment that more and more, “engineering” is becoming just gluing together and managing cloud services and features.

My job as a sys admin has become the same. It’s not about actually understanding the technology at a deep level and troubleshooting problems, it’s about learning specific applets and features to click on and running down daily and weekly checklists.

Performance and how configurable things are, plus ease of use.

For instance, my default router/modem device from my ISP was super clunky and confusing. I needed to set up some custom port forwarding and firewall rules. The aftermarket router I bought was faster, had way better wireless coverage, and the UI was so much easier to set up the configs I needed.

So it’s up to you, from what you said, seems like you probably would be good with the default from your ISP.

Never mind, found the Debian security bulletin, my version is patched already.

Leaving this here for any other newbies that might be wondering.

Sorry, all!

Asserting authority over it’s domain.

Fair point. Frustrating to feel like we live in a world of literally “pick your poison.”

In the last year I have switched to all cast iron, carbon steel, and stainless steel for all my pots and pans.

No Teflon or “non-stick” coated garbage for me. Properly seasoned and cared for cast iron, carbon, or stainless steel will all be nearly as good as a “non-stick” pan and doesn’t have the risk factor.

Recently, non-stick pans have been released that supposedly are safer, but I don’t really feel like trusting billion dollar corpos to not lie for the 20th time about that, not when there are fantastic alternatives.

IT workers desperately need to unionize. There is so much bullshit that happens, folks are expected to do three different roles at once, have multiple technical stacks they are experts in, and work extra hours + be on call after hours or on weekends.

Thanks, and right back at you.

Most every day this week, I’m scared that I’m not going to be able to accomplish all that I want and should.

I’m scared of letting down the people I care about most.

I’m scared that I’m not going to be strong enough when life throws really brutal curve balls at me.

I’ve heard that the DoD uses RHEL pretty extensively. RHEL in the US Military

That article says that the US military has the largest single install base for RHEL in the world, but that was about 15 years ago, I don’t know if that’s still true.

Apparently back then the US nuclear sub fleet and its sonar systems also ran on RHEL.

I suspect lots of military hardware runs some form of *Nix or BSD type system. Many embedded systems run some *Nix type OS, and a huge portion of the developed world’s weaponry is smart, so it it full of low power embedded systems and custom SoCs.

I have a monthly budget that I pay recurring charges out of, a couple hundred USD a year give or take.

I also do a lot of one-off donations to various projects and creators.

I also have some FOSS software/services that I pay monthly for premium features on, like Bitwarden, Proton, and Podverse.

Similar tactic among all the large tech corpos, switch focus to IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, become the backbone of the modern computing landscape.

It’s basically a slow switch to becoming critical international infrastructure like power grids, water ways, and gas/oil pipelines.

This all while locking you in as much as possible and milking as much value as they can squeeze.

https://media1.tenor.com/m/NazCMjC7DOcAAAAC/pce-peace-out.gif

Here’s my twisted life exposed…I have no issue watching 1080p on my QLED 4K TV. I game at 1080p happily, I honestly don’t give a shit about 4K content.

1080p looks good enough for me, and I actually watch 720p on my phone screen half the time too.

And not because of lack of speed, I have a 1Gbps+ fiber line up and down.

And tbh, if it means I get to own and control my media, I would tolerate even worse quality if that’s what I needed to do.

Grunge computing ftw! Quality at the cost of your soul? Fuck that!

You’re not listening to anything I’m saying, so I’m not really interested in continuing.

I’ve been extremely charitable to you despite your offensive commentary with other users and myself, I’ve made a half-dozen points in my other comments and you haven’t engaged with any of them.

You’re either supremely ignorant or you are a blatant transphobe trying to pretend you’re confused and innocently curious.

I’ve given you resources to get informed, if you’re a genuine person you’ll follow them. If not, then your question of why you’re constantly getting banned from inclusive communities has been answered.

You are literally the “enlightened centrist” stereotype, and you are talking nonsense about trans treatment. Despite the vast majority of research showing that gender affirming care has extremely high success rates and almost all trans folks not regretting transitioning, you apparently refuse to accept that.

Worse yet, you are trying to frame your bigotry as love and care, the same way homophobic Christians claim they “love and care about gay people.”

There is no such thing as a “politically neutral” position. That would imply that there is some perfect center between different views, as if political viewpoints can be narrowed down to a 2-dimensional line with “right” & “left.” All views have implications for society, and everybody falls into different varying categories and schools of thought, even if they aren’t aware of it.

Claiming that you don’t means either you are either very ignorant to political theory and philosophy, or you are deliberately being obtuse out of some false sense of moral/intellectual superiority.

Inform yourself, or if you’re a bigot, just be open about it and stop pretending you’re somehow magically above or outside of political/social biases.

Appimage is probably the most similar to a naked .exe in Windows. They are useful for small apps or simple indie games, but I prefer Flatpaks for my everyday big applications.

Agreed, Snaps are like Flatpaks but worse because locked down back end and Canonical’s sketchy nature. Imagine a really delicious pastry that anybody can make and sell, then imagine the same pastry but only one bakery in the world can make and sell it. Which would you prefer? Lol

Essentially yes, if you start using lots if older applications or mixing applications that use many different dependency versions, you will start to use lots of extra disk space because the different apps have to use their own separate dependency trees and so forth.

This doesn’t mean it will be like 2x-3x the size as traditional packages, but from what I’ve seen, it could definitely be 10-20% larger on disk. Not a huge deal for most people, but if you have limited disk space for one reason or another, it could be a problem.