Boss: "Could you join the new DevOps team for a week or two, for some coaching?"

Me: "I'd rather watch you masturbate furiously in a corner of the office while you cry over your ex boyfriend"

Boss: "Yeah... that's why I ask you. You are the only one brave enough to watch"

Me: *Sigh* "But I don't know shit about what DevOps does, I'm a DBA. I've told you the difference a million times. Can't we just douse it in gasoline and set it on fire?"

Boss: "What?"

Me: "Not the team, the servers..."

Boss, imitating Gimli: "And my ex!"

Me: "I get why he left you"

Boss: "It's funny, he was actually better with computers than me, maybe even better than you. He hated me for starting this company, told me I was just chasing money instead of ideals. He just isn't grown up enough to see that there is more to the world than computer games, brewing beer, maker festivals and gay bars, that you need to take responsibility... Maybe it just never works out between managers and geeks..."

Me: "Indeed. The difference in competence is too large"

Boss: "Ugh. You are like straight version of him... but will you at least take a look?"

Me: "Fine, unzip your pants..."

Boss: "No, not that... you need to teach DevOps this docking thing, with the parallel stuff, and the horizontal growth"

Me: "Damn I really hope we're talking about servers now... Do you mean Docker?"

Boss: "That's it. They want to learn how to dock on the Windows servers. They reserved two 4xlarge on AWS. Is that enough for docking?"

Me: ...

Me: ...

Me: "You know what. I'm going back to hug my DB designs, and wash my brain with some queries. Then I'll return here to burn everything to the ground. There is no hope for you left"

Boss: "That's what he said"

Me: "You're using that meme wrong"

Boss: "OK. So what if you just stay on DB management, and I'll just give you the budget to recruit a new DevOps lead and pay for training?"

Me: "That would work"

Boss: "Why are you grinning?"

Me: "Because I have your ex's phone number"

Got laid off my by old employer back in 2019 because they have their priorities completely wrong.
Got a mail today whether I could fix something for them (ofc, they wanted me to do it essentially for free).
One of the websites I built for a customer back when I still worked there had a massive bug (that I was aware off and patched in later versions of the library causing it).
They never updated it so, I told them "just update the library".

Apparently, the idiot that was in charge of maintaining said site after I left didn't know how to and completely broke everything.
The hilarious part: While I setup everything using stuff like Docker and Git to make rollbacks easy...
That idiot went back to FTP and manually upgrading the databases through PhpMyAdmin :^)
He nuked the entire site.
Database? Gone.
Codebase? Borked (installed a version with a lot of breaking changes without properly reading the migration guide).
And knowing that shit company, they don't have any backups either.

They said "I wasn't needed because we have other good devs" when they laid me off.
Uhu, I can eh... see those good devs doing their job :^)

Fuck the memes.

Fuck the framework battles.

Fuck the language battles.

Fuck the titles.

Anybody who has been in this field long enough knows that it doesn't matter if your linus fucking torvalds, there is no human who has lived or ever will live that simultaneously understands, knows, and remembers how to implement, in multiple languages, the following:

- jest mocks for complex React components (partial mocks, full mocks, no mocks at all!)
- token cancellation for asynchronous Tasks in C#
- fullstack CRUD, REST, and websocket communication (throw in gRPC for bonus points)
- database query optimization, seeding, and design
- nginx routing, https redirection
- build automation with full test coverage and environment consideration
- docker container versioning, restoration, and cleanup
- internationalization on both the front AND backends
- secret storage, security audits
- package management, maintenence, and deprecation reviews
- integrating with dozens of APIs
- fucking how to center a div

and that's a _comically_ incomplete list; barely scratches the surface of the full range of what a dev can encounter in a given day of writing software

have many of us probably done one or even all of these at different times? surely.

but does that mean we are supposed to draw that up at a moment's notice some cookie-cutter solution like a fucking robot and spit out an answer on a fax sheet?

recruiters, if you read this site (perhaps only the good ones do anyway so its wasted oxygen), just know that whoever you hire its literally the luck of the draw of how well they perform during the interview. sure, perhaps some perform better, but you can never know how good someone is until they literally start working at your org, so... have fun with that.

Oh and I almost forgot, again for you recruiters, on top of that list which you probably won't ever understand for the entirety of your lives, you can also add writing documentation, backup scripts, and orchestrating / administrating fucking JIRA or actually any somewhat technical dashboard like a CMS or website, because once again, the devs are the only truly competent ones - and i don't even mean in a technical sense, i mean in a HUMAN sense of GETTING SHIT DONE IN GENERAL.

There's literally 2 types of people in the world: those who sit around drawing flow charts and talking on the phone all day, and those WHO LITERALLY FUCKING BUILD THE WORLD

why don't i just run the whole fucking company at this point? you guys are "celebrating" that you made literally $5 dollars from a single customer and i'm just sitting here coding 12 hours a day like all is fine and well

i'm so ANGRY its always the same no matter where i go, non-technical people have just no clue, even when you implore them how long things take, they just nod and smile and say "we'll do it the MVP way". sure, fine, you can do that like 2 or 3 times, but not for 6 fucking months until you have a stack of "MVPs" that come toppling down like the garbage they are.

How do expect to keep the "momentum" of your customers and sales (I hope you can hear the hatred of each of these market words as I type them) if the entire system is glued together with ducktape because YOU wanted to expedite the feature by doing it the EASY way instead of the RIGHT way. god, just forget it, nobody is going to listen anyway, its like the 5th time a row in my life

we NEED tests!
we NEED to know our code coverage!
we NEED to design our system to handle large amounts of traffic!
we NEED detailed logging!
we NEED to start building an exception database!

BILBO BAGGINS! I'm not trying to hurt you! I'm trying to help you!

Don't really know what this rant was, I'm just raging and all over the place at the universe. I'm going to bed.

DISCLAIMER: UNPOPULAR OPINION

I'm tired of the Linux community, they effectively discourage me of taking part in any discussion online

I'm currently making Windows-only soft, some game stuff, some legacy DirectX stuff you got it.

Everytime I go online, this shitty pattern happens, when I stumble upon a problem in project I don't know how to fix and I ask for help
These are responses
- HA, HA, WINDOWS BAD, HA, HA, GET REAL SYSTEM
- In Linux, we can do X too. I mean it has 4x less functionality and way shittier UX and is even harder to implement but it can probably work on too Linux, so it's better, yes, just move to Linux
- btw you didn't like Linux before? Try this distro man, it's better <links random distro>

Is there anything valuable in the Linux community? I feel like these people don't like Linux anyway, they just hate Windows. Every opinion, tip is always opinion based. Anyone who works on internals knows how much better and how well thought is Windows kernel compared to Linux kernel. Also, if someone unironically uses Linux distro on desktop PC then he's a masochist because desktop Linux is dieing. So many distros ceased work only this year.

Is it a good tool for servers and docker containers? I don't have my head stuck up my ass to admit that yes, it's much better than Windows here.

This community got me stressed right now, I fear that when I go to bathroom or open my microwave there's gonna be a Linux distro recommendation there

😠😡😠😴

> Last year wrote a unittest - I was asked to delete it
> no design patterns. Not a single one
> no encapsulation
> fucked up inheritance [I had no idea it was possible at all...]
> generics every-fucking-where
> I could go on...

this month the lead dev was not in and I had to make a new feature. Guess what I did :)

tdd [coverage >90%], a couple of builders, a factory or two, two composites, one decorator, only a few generics - only where really needed. Private fields, not a single @Autowired field [they were fucking my tdd], nicely abstracted integrations, and so on. Everything is writen according to clean code: max 10loc methods, <140col lines, reusable constants and utils, SOLID as a rock, etc.

Due date is next week. Took me 3 weeks to craft it.

Guess who's gonna be piiiiiiiiiiiiisssedd 😁

the best part - I don't even work there, our company was hired for xx hours as helping hands 😁

that's not all. They have like 6 envs and their deployment is all-fucking-manual. Will try to learn how to dockerize that app and deploy it on docker. Gosh I wish I could see his face when he's back 😁

p.S. From ethical point of view, he's the only dev who believes his code is perfect. No other dev in the team agrees. AND he once said: 'it's gonna be my way or no way at all'. So I don't think I did wrong... Did I? :)

Boss: "So I'm taking the next week off. In the mean time, I added some stuff for you to do on Gitlab, we'd need you to pull this Docker image, run it, setup the minimal requirement and play with it until you understand what it does."

Me: "K boss, sounds fun!" (no irony here)

First day: Unable to login to the remote repository. Also, I was given a dude's name to contact if I had troubles, the dude didn't answer his email.

2nd day: The dude aswered! Also, I realized that I couldn't reach the repository because the ISP for whom I work blocks everything within specific ports, and the url I had to reach was ":5443". Yay. However, I still can't login to the repo nor pull the image, the connection gets closed.

3rd day (today): A colleague suggested that I removed myself off the ISP's network and use my 4G or something. And it worked! Finally!! Now all I need to do is to set that token they gave me, set a first user, a first password and... get a 400 HTTP response. Fuck. FUCK. FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!!!

These fuckers display a 401 error, while returning a 400 error in the console log!! And the errors says what? "Request failed with status code 401" YES THANK YOU, THIS IS SO HELPFUL! Like fuck yea, I know exactly how t fix this, except that I don't because y'all fuckers don't give any detail on what could be the problem!

4th day (tomorrow): I'm gonna barbecue these sons of a bitch

(bottom note: the dude that answered is actually really cool, I won't barbecue him)

I wrote a node + vue web app that consumes bing api and lets you block specific hosts with a click, and I have some thoughts I need to post somewhere.

My main motivation for this it is that the search results I've been getting with the big search engines are lacking a lot of quality. The SEO situation right now is very complex but the bottom line is that there is a lot of white hat SEO abuse.

Commercial companies are fucking up the internet very hard. Search results have become way too profit oriented thus unneutral. Personal blogs are becoming very rare. Information is losing quality and sites are losing identity. The internet is consollidating.

So, I decided to write something to help me give this situation the middle finger.

I wrote this because I consider the ability to block specific sites a basic universal right. If you were ripped off by a website or you just don't like it, then you should be able to block said site from your search results. It's not rocket science.

Google used to have this feature integrated but they removed it in 2013. They also had an extension that did this client side, but they removed it in 2018 too. We're years past the time where Google forgot their "Don't be evil" motto.

AFAIK, the only search engine on earth that lets you block sites is millionshort.com, but if you block too many sites, the performance degrades. And the company that runs it is a for profit too.

There is a third party extension that blocks sites called uBlacklist. The problem is that it only works on google. I wrote my app so as to escape google's tracking clutches, ads and their annoying products showing up in between my results.

But aside uBlacklist does the same thing as my app, including the limitation that this isn't an actual search engine, it's just filtering search results after they are generated.

This is far from ideal because filter results before the results are generated would be much more preferred.

But developing a search engine is prohibitively expensive to both index and rank pages for a single person. Which is sad, but can't do much about it.

I'm also thinking of implementing the ability promote certain sites, the opposite to blocking, so these promoted sites would get more priority within the results.

I guess I would have to move the promoted sites between all pages I fetched to the first page/s, but client side.

But this is suboptimal compared to having actual access to the rank algorithm, where you could promote sites in a smarter way, but again, I can't build a search engine by myself.

I'm using mongo to cache the results, so with a click of a button I can retrieve the results of a previous query without hitting bing. So far a couple of queries don't seem to bring much performance or space issues.

On using bing: bing is basically the only realiable API option I could find that was hobby cost worthy. Most microsoft products are usually my last choice.

Bing is giving me a 7 day free trial of their search API until I register a CC. They offer a free tier, but I'm not sure if that's only for these 7 days. Otherwise, I'm gonna need to pay like 5$.

Paying or not, having to use a CC to use this software I wrote sucks balls.

So far the usage of this app has resulted in me becoming more critical of sites and finding sites of better quality. I think overall it helps me to become a better programmer, all the while having better protection of my privacy.

One not upside is that I'm the only one curating myself, whereas I could benefit from other people that I trust own block/promote lists.

I will git push it somewhere at some point, but it does require some more work:
I would want to add a docker-compose script to make it easy to start, and I didn't write any tests unfortunately (I did use eslint for both apps, though).
The performance is not excellent (the app has not experienced blocks so far, but it does make the coolers spin after a bit) because the algorithms I wrote were very POC.
But it took me some time to write it, and I need to catch some breath.

There are other more open efforts that seem to be more ethical, but they are usually hard to use or just incomplete.

commoncrawl.org is a free index of the web. one problem I found is that it doesn't seem to index everything (for example, it doesn't seem to index the blog of a friend I know that has been writing for years and is indexed by google).

it also requires knowledge on reading warc files, which will surely require some time investment to learn.

it also seems kinda slow for responses,

it is also generated only once a month, and I would still have little idea on how to implement a pagerank algorithm, let alone code it.

Some "engineers" entire jobs seems to only consist of enforcing ridiculous bureaucracy in multinational companies.

I'm not going to get specific, the flow is basically:

- Developer that has to actually write code and build functionality gets given a task, engineer needs X to do it - a jenkins job, a small k8s cluster, etc.
- Developer needs to get permission from some highly placed "engineer" who hasn't touched a docker image or opened a PR in the last 2 years
- Sends concise documentation on what needs to be built, why X is needed, etc.

Now we enter the land of needless bureaucracy. Everything gets questioned by people who put near 0 effort into actually understanding why X is needed.

They are already so much more experienced than you - so why would they need to fucking read anything you send them.

They want to arrange public meetings where they can flaunt their "knowledge" and beat on whatever you're building publicly while they still have nearly 0 grasp of what it actually is.

I hold a strong suspicion that they use these meetings simply as a way to publicly show their "impact", as they'll always make sure enough important people are invited. X will 99% of the time get approved eventually anyway, and the people approving it just know the boxes are being ticked while still not understanding it.

Just sick of dealing with people like this. Engineers that don't code can be great, reasonable people. I've had brilliant Product Owners, Architects, etc. But some of them are a fucking nightmare to deal with.

Hey guys! lambda is amazing! Docker containers! They said the whole amazing point with containers is that they run the same everywhere! Except not really, because lambda 'containers' are an abomination of *nix standards with arbitrary rules that really don't make sense! That's ok though, you can push your shit to fargate, then it will work more like those docker containers you know and love and can run locally! Oh wait! fargate is a pain in the ass x 2 just to setup! You want to expose your REST api running on a container to the world? well ha, you'd better be ready to spend literally 2 weeks to configure every fucking piece of technology that every existed just to do that!!!! it's great, AWS, i love it, i'm so fucking big brained smart!!!

give me a break.... back in my day you'd set up an nginx instance, put your REST / websocket / graphQL service whatever behind it, and call it a day!!!!!!!

even with tools like pulumi or terraform this is a pain in the ass and a half, i mean what are we really doing here folks

way too complicated, the whole AWS infrastructure is setup for companies who need such a level of granularity because they have 1 billion users daily... too bad there are like 5 companies on the planet who need this level of complexity!!!!!!!

oh, and if your ego is bashed because of this post, maybe reread it and realize you're the 🤡

i'm unhappy because i was lied to. docker containers are docker containers, until they aren't. *nix standards are *nix standards, until they aren't

bed time.

About slightly more than a year ago I started volunteering at the local general students committee. They desperately searched for someone playing the role of both political head of division as well as the system administrator, for around half a year before I took the job.

When I started the data center was mostly abandoned with most of the computational power and resources just laying around unused. They already ran some kvm-hosts with around 6 virtual machines, including a cloud service, internally used shared storage, a user directory and also 10 workstations and a WiFi-Network. Everything except one virtual machine ran on GNU/Linux-systems and was built on open source technology. The administration was done through shared passwords, bash-scripts and instructions in an extensive MediaWiki instance.

My introduction into this whole eco-system was basically this:
"Ever did something with linux before? Here you have the logins - have fun. Oh, and please don't break stuff. Thank you!"

Since I had only managed a small personal server before and learned stuff about networking, it-sec and administration only from courses in university I quickly shaped a small team eager to build great things which would bring in the knowledge necessary to create something awesome. We had a lot of fun diving into modern technologies, discussing the future of this infrastructure and simply try out and fail hard while implementing those ideas.

Today, a year and a half later, we look at around 40 virtual machines spiced with a lot of magic. We host several internal and external services like cloud, chat, ticket-system, websites, blog, notepad, DNS, DHCP, VPN, firewall, confluence, freifunk (free network mesh), ubuntu mirror etc. Everything is managed through a central puppet-configuration infrastructure. Changes in configuration are deployed in minutes across all servers. We utilize docker for application deployment and gitlab for code management. We provide incremental, distributed backups, a central database and a distributed network across the campus. We created a desktop workstation environment based on Ubuntu Server for deployment on bare-metal machines through the foreman project. Almost everything free and open source.

The whole system now is easily configurable, allows updating, maintenance and deployment of old and new services. We reached our main goal for this year which was the creation of a documented environment which is maintainable by one administrator.

Although we did this in our free-time without any payment it was a great year with a lot of experience which pays off now.

OK semi rant... Would like suggestions

Boss wants me to figure out someway to find the maximum load/users our servers/API/database can handle before it freezes or crashes **under normal usage**.

HOW THE FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO DO THAT WITH 1 PC? The question seems to me to mean how big a DDoS can it handle?

I'm not sure if this is vague requirements, don't know what they're talking about, or they think I can shit gold... for nothing... or I'm missing something (I'm thinking how many concurrent requests and a single Neville melee even with 4 CPUs)

"Oh just doing up some cloud servers"

Uh well I'm a developer, I've never used Chef or Puppet and or cloud sucks, it's like a web GUI, not only do I have to create the instances manually and would have to upload the testing programs to each manually... And set up the envs needed to run it.

Docker you say? There's no Docker here... Prebuilt VM images? Not supported.

And it's due in 2 weeks...

I'm considering quitting a job I started a few weeks ago. I'll probably try to find other work first I suppose.

I'm UK based and this is the 6th programming/DevOps role I've had and I've never seen a team that is so utterly opposed to change. This is the largest company I've worked for in a full time capacity so someone please tell me if I'm going to see the same things at other companies of similar sizes (1000 employees). Or even tell me if I'm just being too opinionated and that I simply have different priorities than others I'm working with. The only upside so far is that at least 90% of the people I've been speaking to are very friendly and aren't outwardly toxic.

My first week, I explained during the daily stand up how I had been updating the readmes of a couple of code bases as I set them up locally, updated docker files to fix a few issues, made missing env files, and I didn't mention that I had also started a soon to be very long list of major problems in the code bases. 30 minutes later I get a call from the team lead saying he'd had complaints from another dev about the changes I'd spoke about making to their work. I was told to stash my changes for a few weeks at least and not to bother committing them.

Since then I've found out that even if I had wanted to, I wouldn't have been allowed to merge in my changes. Sprints are 2 weeks long, and are planned several sprints ahead. Trying to get any tickets planned in so far has been a brick wall, and it's clear management only cares about features.

Weirdly enough but not unsurprisingly I've heard loads of complaints about the slow turn around of the dev team to get out anything, be it bug fixes or features. It's weird because when I pointed out that there's currently no centralised logging or an error management platform like bugsnag, there was zero interest. I wrote a 4 page report on the benefits and how it would help the dev team to get away from fire fighting and these hidden issues they keep running into. But I was told that it would have to be planned for next year's work, as this year everything is already planned and there's no space in the budget for the roughly $20 a month a standard bugsnag plan would take.

The reason I even had time to write up such a report is because I get given work that takes 30 minutes and I'm seemingly expected to take several days to do it. I tried asking for more work at the start but I could tell the lead was busy and was frankly just annoyed that he was having to find me work within the narrow confines of what's planned for the sprint.

So I tried to keep busy with a load of code reviews and writing reports on road mapping out how we could improve various things. It's still not much to do though. And hey when I brought up actually implementing psr12 coding standards, there currently aren't any standards and the code bases even use a mix of spaces and tab indentation in the same file, I seemingly got a positive impression at the only senior developer meeting I've been to so far. However when I wrote up a confluence doc on setting up psr12 code sniffing in the various IDEs everyone uses, and mentioned it in a daily stand up, I once again got kickback and a talking to.

It's pretty clear that they'd like me to sit down, do my assigned work, and otherwise try to look busy. While continuing with their terrible practices.

After today I think I'll have to stop trying to do code reviews too as it's clear they don't actually want code to be reviewed. A junior dev who only started writing code last year had written probably the single worst pull request I've ever seen. However it's still a perfectly reasonable thing, they're junior and that's what code reviews are for. So I went through file by file and gently suggested a cleaner or safer way to achieve things, or in a couple of the worst cases I suggested that they bring up a refactor ticket to be made as the code base was trapping them in shocking practices. I'm talking html in strings being concatenated in a class. Database migrations that use hard coded IDs from production data. Database queries that again quote arbitrary production IDs. A mix of tabs and spaces in the same file. Indentation being way off. Etc, the list goes on.
Well of course I get massive kickback from that too, not just from the team lead who they complained to but the junior was incredibly rude and basically told me to shut up because this was how it was done in this code base. For the last 2 days it's been a bit of a back and forth of me at least trying to get the guy to fix the formatting issues, and my lead has messaged me multiple times asking if it can go through code review to QA yet. I don't know why they even bother with code reviews at this point.

When your the only one who wants to use Docker in your work but your team won't.

There's very little good use cases for mongo, change my mind.

Prototyping maybe? Rails can prototype, create/update/destroy db schemas really quickly anyways.

If you're doing a web app, there's tons of libs that let you have a store in your app, even a fake mongo on the browser.

Are the reads fast? When I need that, use with redis.

Can it be an actual replacement for an app's db? No. Safety mechanisms that relational dbs have are pretty much must haves for a production level app.
Data type checks, null checks, foreign key checks, query checks.
All this robustness, this safety is something critical to maintain the data of an app sane.

Screw ups in the app layer affecting the data are a lot less visible and don't get noticed immediately (things like this can happen with relational dbs but are a lot less likely)

Let's not even get into mutating structures. Once you pick a structure with mongo, you're pretty much set.
Redoing a structure is manual, and you better have checks afterwards.

But at the same time, this is kind of a pro for mongo, since if there's variable data, as in some fields that are not always present, you don't need to create column for them, they just go into the data.

But you can have json columns in postgres too!

Is it easier to migrate than relational dbs? yes, but docker makes everything easy also.

GitHub Packages Sucks. Like, it REALLY sucks.

It sounds like the best thing in the world - being able to host your project packages alongside your code! It has full support for Maven, Gradle, Ruby Gems, Node packages, Docker images and even dotnet CLI applications. It even lets you view statistics on how many developers have downloaded a given package! For public repositories, the packages are free to host as well!

So, I decide to use it for my Maven project since it's "so great". I've never used a public Maven repository before, so this was all very new to me. I follow the documentation - simply run "mvn deploy ...." and use a generated GitHub personal access token. No problems there. Deployment is a success and I feel a wave of happiness seeing my packages online. I follow through the various links and it even adds automatically generated usage information for other Maven users - fantastic!

That was, until I decide to try and download one of the files from this package repository. In order to download a file, you must have a GitHub access token. Okay, makes sense I guess? What if another developer wants to use my library? To do so, they have to generate their own GitHub access token, store it in their local ~/.m2/settings.xml file and only THEN can they use my library. So clearly, this is significantly inferior to other public Maven repositories where you don't have to get an access token to simply USE a library.

Upon discovering this, I decide to simply delete all of the packages and continue using whatever previous system I was using. Except of course, they forbid the deletion of public packages because "other projects could depend on it". The only way to delete public packages is to either:

[0] Make the repository private (losing all stargazers and watchers), delete the packages and then make the repository public again
[1] Contact support and ask them to delete the public packages. They say that they'll only do this for "special cases", such as legal issues or GDPR breaches.

I've sent a contact form and I'm currently hoping that they see things in my favor. I mean seriously - a public package repository where in order to use it you have to have a GitHub account and then generate an authentication token - it's absurd!

I don't know if it's age, having too many other things I can/need do, not having any more major personal tech itches to scratch, or just seeing no point in learning any new tech unless I need it for work... But I've just been coding less personally... And maybe even at work...

I feel like in terms of being a dev, there's nothing else I want anymore, nothing I want to learn unless I actually need it...

I haven't done any major personal projects in maybe the last year or more (although I have made small tweaks to a few of my existing ones).

And well I don't care anymore about React, Angular, or the latest JS frameworks or have any interested with Cloud or Docker....

And as long as I have a decent job, even though it's pretty boring and not much growth.... I don't care and no longer bother trying to get a better one...

Wondering if anyone else feels like they have peaked or just lost the drive and motivation to get better?

I don't know maybe it's just work... Ok my team I think I'm probably the best and will I'm tired of telling other people what they should do.... And maybe also tired of looking for or chasing "opportunities" that don't seem to lead to anything.... Except wasted time and effort?

So, I work as a sysadmin junior (6 months and going), and in the past few months, I learned what my boss warned me about - Devs don't understand us admins, and we don't understand the devs.

We have this huge client who is about to migrate to our company (We do mostly server managment/Housing/Renting), and I am so gald I don't have to work on the migration myself!

Just hearing what the company devs say makes me facepalm: No, it won't work. It cannot work on just 3 machines (They use like... 20 in total), no, we won't get rid of our docker swarm, that's essential (Doing the absolute minimum in their infrastructure, just a fancy buzzword to lure people on. Though they've spent like 2 years developing the app that uses it, so they my not want to give it up).

I kid you not, once, they replied to an email that contained the phrase "To be afraid of/worried about" something during the migration, that something could break, not work, be unstable. 7 times.

Might not sound as bad, but it was a rather short mail, and when they're so afraid of everything, its kinda hard to cooperate with them.

My colleague literally spent this entire week mapping out /their/ infrastructure, because they were unable to provide us with the description themselves.

And as a cherry on top, they sent us a "graph" of relationships of all the parts of their infrastructure that was this jumbled mess of rectangles and arrows. Oh, and half of all the machines were not even in the graph at all! Stating that "We also have all this, but I really don't know how to ilustracte the interactions anymore"

Why do companies like that exist? If you build an infrastructure yourself, shouldn't at least someone know exactly how it works?

I have a small NUC-like machine in my home with an old external hdd connected to it. I use it to run my local gitlab, nextcloud and to test a few websites I build for the lolz.
If you too have a homelab, whether it's a single raspberry or an entire room full or racks, you know damn well that everything you have running locally as a web service keeps going until it doesn't, for whatever fucking reason. This time, it was the turn of my nextcloud.
The machine has arch linux running, I chose it since I already use it on my coding laptop and being a rolling release means I don't have to manually upgrade to a newer version, risking various fuck-ups and consequent screaming of profanity.
The downside is that arch is a bleeding-edge distro, so, despite being pretty good for what concerns security, as updates are pushed out some packages may still require legacy software to work as intended, since obviously not all developers for all packages can release simultaneously.
The problem was that php reached 8.2.x but nextcloud couldn't use anything beyond 8.1, so the highlighted solution was to download php-legacy, a package with a set of utilities which the cloud could use instead of mainline php.

Pretty easy, right? fuck my life, here we go.

I edited apache-httpd's configurations to link the new libraries, updated every reference in every virtual host that could possibly screw up the web server.

Done.

Then I went on and disabled the php-fpm mainline, creating a new systemd unit that would instead run the legacy executable and afterwards I edited nextcloud's additional configs so they use that instead.

Done, getting a bit dizzy, but I reboot everything and breathe.

At this point the migration should be complete, but wait, the server returns an error saying that the application is still trying to use php 8.2+...wait, what in the sysadmin Christ?

Back to nextcloud config, everything is set, everything else in every other fucking php-legacy and web server is fine, the old fpm service is disabled, I am confused, and why in the FUCKING FUCK is the new php-fpm unit failing to start at boot with "error 78/config - directory not found"? Hello? Am I being trolled by a shitty dual-core amazon fake NUC?
Maybe yes, cause it turns out that the unit was referencing a directory in the external hdd, which gets mounted at boot time after the unit itself starts, so nothing much, just a matter of tinkering with cron jobs, a reboot and at least this one is off my balls.

But why still isn't the server responding correctly? why? WHY?

After slamming my cock on the keyboard here and there scrolling back through all the config files I think to myself, hmmm, my gitlab is working flawlessly, well yeah, I didn't need to install the whole web stack, everything was nice and easy wrapped in a docker container...so why am I even here, why the fuck am I bothering with all this layered web-app bullshit, why don't I just run the up-to-date docker image that someone else has already set up for me, back up all the data and reupload them on the application?

Oh joy, you can't imagine, after 3...almost 4 hours of pure computer-touching the relief I had from seeing the blue web page with the "welcome to nextcloud" title.

Right now it's copying back all the files, and the external hdd is now linked to include the data folder.
Like really, everything was solved in two lines of bash.

I am still fuming, but at least I learned a valuable lesson, if you want a service up for yourself, implement it and deploy it as fucking easy straight-forward as you can, giving MAXIMUM priority to already fully-working options that are out there just waiting to be downloaded and used. I swing my scrotal sack on web-apps elegance as long as it's MY homelab in MY place.

Eat a fat dick php.

sudo pacman -Rns nextcloud
sudo systemctl disable --now php-fpm-legacy
sudo pacman -Rns php-legacy
sudo pacman -Rns $(sudo pacman -Qdtq)

!!!rant
f**king cooperate d**ckheads this ppl are work-shipped like gods who just ask stupid questions just for name sake and they don't know what the heck is going on underneath...they use fancy words like cloud/docker/etc and they please top management d**kers and this guys are top in chain...f**king cooperate political word... _|__

Anyone know of a good docker backup tool?

I'm working with fairly limited space here so Im looking for a tool to allow me to backup and restore my docker instance without storing easily recreatable data.

That means that what I want to backup are:
- Container specs (inspections or the like)
- Contents of persistent, non-nfs volumes

Since the image and the contents of my nfs volumes are stored elsewhere, and my space is limited, I decided not to back them up. Same for non-persistent (unnamed) volumes since they mostly contain stuff that you don't want to recreate on every container update or recreation but can easily be recreated if needed.

The hope is that this approach should give me a pretty slim backup while still preserving everything I need to recreate my whole docker instance.

Thanks in advance!

Is docker even suitable for anything that isn't deployment?

So much time, so much effort, so much trial and error, and I still feel like I don't know what Docker is for.

I had a development VirtualBox machine, which I used just to compile my code and test my application. So I said "why don't I just use Docker? It would be way simpler". Also because that fucking Virtualbox image was like 10GB, and it was slow af.

The VirtualBox machine wasn't created by me, but it was just given to me by a previous developer, so I just had to imagine what I needed and pick up the pieces. In few hours I was ready with my Dockerfile.

So I tried it, and....... obviously it didn't work. I entered inside my container and I tried to manually execute commands in order to see where it breaks, and I tried to fix each of them. They were just the usual Linux dependencies problems, incompatibility among libraries, and so on.

Putting everything in order, I started over again with a virgin Ubuntu image, and I tried to fix every single error that appeared, I typed something like 1 hundred commands just to have my development machine up and running.

Now I have a running container that works, I don't know how to reproduce it with a Dockerfile, and I don't know what I'm supposed to do with it, because I'm afraid that any wrong command could destroy the container and lose all the job I did. I can't even bind folders because start/exec doesn't support bindings, so I've to copy files.

Furthermore, the documentation about start/exec is very limited, and every question on StackOverflow just talks about deployment. So am I wrong? Did I use containers for something that wasn't their main purpose? What am I supposed to do now? I'm lost, I feel so much stupid.

Just tell me what to do or call a psychologist

So... the guy from my last rant completely screwed up a site he'd been working on for our company (blaming the web hosters for their "shitty config" while it was just an error in his .htaccess).

He then proceeded to do it all from scratch (instead of using already existing stuff like he did before).

He asked me to help him out.

I put as conditions that we where going to do it "my" way, with the tools I am pushing at work (Docker, Git, CakePHP and Sass).

He rejected it (as always) saying: "I don't care if the site looks good or works good, I just want something out of the door ASAP".

So I declined because I just can't work with that mentality.

He asked an intern (of which he actually has no saying but w/e) whom barely understands the basics of HTML and CSS to help him out.

Intern agreed and they started working on it.

Two weeks in and the guy takes a nice two week holiday, leaving the intern all by himself :)

something something "I want it out of the door asap"...

I have been working on a long time, low progress project of mine that keeps on giving and giving.

Let's begin like two years ago where I dipped my toes into "more then gigabit" networking thanks to a Linus Techtips video about infiniband.
I had the dream of booting my Workstation from my NAS, a so called diskless setup.

Well, since I run FreeNAS on my Nas , a very nice Freebsd based Nas OS, everything's gonna be good.

In the beginning, there was no infiniband support.
Turns out, you don't need it, since the mellanox CX2 nics can do ETH too.
Yay.
Just took me a few weeks of anger.

So, to be able to boot something over the network, you need firmware that finds the bookable stuff and loads it.
That protocol and firmware is called PXE.
PXE needs a DHCP telling it what to do, and what is where and etc.

Freenas here I come! Installing dnsmasq on the actual freenas install turned out to be not that great of an idea because freenas thinks of itself as being an "appliance" that you don't fiddle with. So things work, until you update/ upgrade when everything will basically be wiped, except what you have done through the ui.
Ok. So I gona use a jail, a container like thing for that.
Everything is great, jail has internet, everything Installs fine, what could go wrong?
Dnsmasq can launch and work, but not as dhcp server. Some thing about permissions.
Turns out, jails have permission like things.
A few days of head scratching later, it has ALL the permissions.
Dnsmasq still can't work as DHCP server though, why you ask?
Because it needs a specific kernelmodule that isn't contained in the jail. Since jails are kind of like a docker container, they run on the same OS kernel, who does not have this module, I'd need to patch the freenas, which is an appliance, so fuck that.

Like a year later, freenas has finally added good VM support, so why not make a VM for the dhcpserver?

Well, about a year ago, I didn't know that the virtual Intel nic is a fucken unstable piece of garbage, crashing nearly any OS at some point.

So that was it for a while again.

Now to the last few weeks.
Finally dnsmasq is running in a freebsd VM with a good and working configuration which is rather simple, if those tutorial fuckers out there would explain shit instead of just telling you to copy, paste and replace X.

Now back to the PXE side.
I'm using iPXE because I have no clue how to boot anything over tftp so iSCSi it is, since that is what I can relate too.
The idea behind iscsi is to fake a SCSI disk over the network. Attached devices appear as if they are actually directly connected to the machine instead of over the network.

iPXE gets a lease from the server, can connect to it, everything is fucken great. Finally.
Except that if it "sanBoots" the iscsi drive, it can't find anything to boot.
Well fuck.
If I attach a Linux live USB over iscsi, it boots, finds grub, and crashes because the live iso isn't configured for network-boot.
But it boots.
So what's so different?

Well iPXE is booted in legacy mode, where as the content of the target is windows 10 in efi mode.
Ffff.

Ok. Can I get iPXE to boot in EFI mode?

Well yes, after like 3 days fiddling with it.
But it only finds the onboard Intel nic instead of the new Mellanox CX3 cards, and can't even connect to the target....

Sooo, I guess my options are as follows.
Either, get PXE efi to work on the network cards directly, its called flexboot and might be able to since I just found some firmware options for that.

Or give up on efi and install windows in legacy mode.
Which isn't that easy when it has to end up on a drive on my nas.