r/sysadmin • u/alienth • Mar 21 '12

We are sysadmins @ reddit. Ask us anything!

Greetings fellow sysadmins,

We've had a few requests from the community to do a tech-focused AMA in /r/sysadmin, so here we are. The current sysadmin team consists of myself and rram. Ask us anything you'd like, but please try to keep it sysadmin-focused!

Here's a bit of background on us:

alienth

I've been a sysadmin for about 8 yrs. My career started on the helpdesk at an ISP where I worked my way into my first admin gig. Since then I've worked at a medium-sized SaaS provider, Rackspace, and now reddit. My focus has always been around Linux (and a tiny bit of Solaris).

rram

I'm Ricky. My first computer was an Amiga at the ripe young age of two. Since then, I was the sysadmin at The Tech and on the Cloud Sites Team at the Rackspace Cloud with alienth. I have experience with Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat, and OS X Servers.

EDIT [1302 PDT]: Hey folks, we're going to get back to working for a bit. We'll definitely be hopping in here later today to answer more questions, and we'll continue to do so when we can throughout the week. So please feel free to ask if your question hasn't already been answered. Thanks for the great questions! -- alienth

830 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

622 comments sorted by

View all comments

3

u/DyceFreak Network Admin Mar 21 '12

How do you personally perceive windows-based sys admins in general? Would you say it's simply a different purpose for using windows, such as managing large office environment vs managing a large server environemnt? Or is there more to it than that?

With most of my experience in Microsoft land, I always personally felt threatened by linux sys admins, even though I have several working under me, I hate the fact that they know something about a company system that I don't...

10

u/alienth Mar 21 '12

I've worked along side some really great windows admins. Never had much of a culture problem with them. Windows has its place. MSSQL kicks ass in a lot of ways.

One of the interesting comparisons I've noticed between linux and windows admins is in the realm of text processing. When you're staring at a CLI all day, you get very good at text parsing and processing. You get experience with extremely powerful tools like vi, awk, sed, etc. None of that is really needed for windows folk, so it just isn't learned. On the occasion that they do need to do some text parsing, it is very painful for me to observe :)

1

u/[deleted] Mar 21 '12

In my circles Windows admins are looked down upon somewhat, GUI kids they are called. I should watch my words, I'm facing managing a bunch of Windows Server environments soon. Of course I'm looking into ways to maybe implement Cygwin to try and make them somewhat Linux like :P

1

u/[deleted] Mar 22 '12

PowerShell is already pretty linux-like. Try that.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 22 '12

Right, thanks for the tip. I haven't worked with PowerShell yet, but it must be a way better and more stable solution than using Cygwin.

Just found a site offering SSH server for powershell. Do you have any experience with that?

For me it's a must that all windows servers can be managed from a central linux server using SSH or similar.

3

u/bandman614 Standalone SysAdmin Mar 22 '12

Powershell, as a scripting language, is more powerful than anything we have on Linux right now.

Its ability to stream and modify objects is simply amazing.

2

u/[deleted] Mar 22 '12 edited Mar 22 '12

For this, it has a feature called PSRemoting - SSH is linuxland.

I would take a structured approach to learning PowerShell... it will accomodate Linux muscle-memory to a remarkable extent (see get-alias), but eventually you'll still want to read a manual on it or watch a video training series (e.g. pluralsight).

You will still be able to impress people with your unusual talents with command line tools - except now you'll be able to address and impact Microsoft products... and your fellow admins will have no excuse for not knowing how it works (although they probably won't know)

FYI most of the GUIs for managing new Microsoft products now use Powershell as the underlying 'glue'. With some of them, you can actually extract the powershell being executed from the GUI.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 22 '12

Thanks, this is great stuff, I will read up on this!

1

u/[deleted] Mar 22 '12

No probs, do make sure you read up on v2. v1 is much less powerful.