Magic!

Me merging a PR at ten till five on a Friday #sysadmin

Hey Mastodon, question for my #sysadmin and #DevOps types. Has anyone used #Pester and #PSScriptAnalyzer to set up unit testing for test driven development, particularly on (relatively) simple scripts like you might use for application detection, installation, and uninstallation from a system like #SCCM #Intune or #ManageEngine ?

Apologies for the buzzword bingo, but I’m trying to reach folks who may be following the hashtags, but not necessarily have a connection otherwise.

Hey #Linux newbs

You're probably spending a lot of time beating your head against stubborn errors that just won't go away, and feeling very down and frustrated about it. Statistically speaking, based on my own experience becoming "expert" at this, you're probably feeling this way a lot of the time, and that is not for no reason.

You're probably also wondering when you no longer will have to spend hours hitting yourself in the head with a hammer. How many years of this intense pain will it require?

Well, I'm here to assure you, it never ends. You never stop having this happen. I just spent an hour fighting a samba share to let me write to the shared drive. I did everything friggin right. It was just like the first time I tried to do this. I even did everything "correctly" this time, created a special user for the credentials, made sure it had group writing access by joining it to my user's group... still, permission denied every time I try to create a file.

So turns out that I added james to the movieUser group, rather than adding the movieUser to the james group. all it needed, an hour ago, was that I put those two words in the correct order in my usermod command.

So basically, as you sit there stewing in anger and befuddlement, let this be the moment that you realize that the developers of this chimera are all apes doing whatever they want, and therefore, it is entirely impossible to become an actual "expert" at this, because whatever you take the time to become expert at will be immediately deprecated and moved on from in favour of some other, equivalent drek with whollly different command structures and conventions.

Or you'll just flip a group/user assignment and spend an hour beating your head against your own idiocy.

Either way, the skill you are actually building up is not technical, but emotional: You are learning to feel this incoherent rage and urge to quit, to let it have its way with you, but to continue working through it and trying new things until it does what you tell it to do, even as you feel this horrific emotional state.

That's it, that's the trick to becoming an elite #sysadmin. You forego movies and sports events with your friends, you forego watching that movie or show, you eliminate all fun and sunshine from your life, and you spend all the time you can get putting yourself into this rage, until you don't notice the rage anymore.

Now you are l33t, and vaguely resemble an angry goblin most of the time. One of us! One of us! One of us!

2.5 Admins 240: 30 DVI Cables

The key differences between throughput and latency – and when they matter, the tech that we’d keep if we stopped working in IT, and avoiding bitrot with rsync backups.

https://2.5admins.com/2-5-admins-240/

Interesting cryptic news for anyone who uses atop:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/26/uninstall_atop_for_now/

Related to yesterday's journey into reading and writing ext4 on macOS, wherein an eyebrow of doubt is firmly raised in the direction of USB reliabiity on the MiniPC I'm using as a home server.

gemini://s73.girv.in/glog/2025/2025-03-27-mini-pc-server-usb-suspicions.gmi

https://s73.girv.in/glog/2025/2025-03-27-mini-pc-server-usb-suspicions.html

Another round of “hey, your server is down!” drama from the "we need moar kubernetes!" crowd.

“I can’t reach your server, it must be down.”

I connect. Everything’s fine.

A few emails later, I ask to access the container. The dev says he can’t - doesn’t know how. He’s a nice guy, though, so he gives me the credentials.

I log in and find the issue: someone pushed a workload to production (cue Kubernetes! Moooaaarrr powaaaarrr! We have the cloud! Who needs sysadmins anymore?!) with DNS set to 192.168.1.1.

Of course, it fell to me to investigate, because the dev couldn’t even get a shell inside his container. And it's ok, as he's a dev - and just wants to be a dev.

Once I pointed it out, they rebuilt the container with the correct config and - TADA! - everything worked again.

Then he went to check other workloads (for other clients, not managed by me) that had been having issues for weeks... Same problem.

It was DNS.
But it wasn't DNS.

Is there any OSS or FOSS e-mail client, for Linux or Windows that has native ActiveSync support (not EWS)?

I can't seem to find any, and considering it's been around "for a while", I would have thought there would be some (yes, I'm aware of all the fabulous *DAV variants, thanks).

(I mean, there are plenty of e-mail servers that run on Linux, for example, that has server-side support for it.)

Hello everyone! Here's a small #introduction :)

I'm Camelia, a #queer #FOSS developer and #sysadmin. I use she/they pronouns (both are equally fine).

I recently got rid of my online pseudonym, which was "Twann" for the last 4 years. Since a name change can be confusing for people who didn't get notified, I thought I'd do a proper introduction again.

I'm the main developer of the @tblock content blocker, and I recently started self-hosting my Forgejo instance. You can also find my work on Codeberg (link in bio).

I also have a website (and a blog), which you can browse at: https://camelia.dev/

I am also the person who initiated a call to open source developers to not share the work of others on GitHub. If you've ever seen a "No GitHub" badge on a project's README, you'll know what I'm talking about. If you don't, feel free to visit: https://nogithub.codeberg.page/

I'm looking forward to meeting you all from around the fediverse!

In the early 90s I worked with Data General Dasher D2 serial terminals that are the inspiration for the computers in Severance. The D2 was in the printer room and was used to control the print queues. The keyboards were shit, partly because even at that time those terminals were long in the tooth (introduced 1977), and the keyboards were starting to go.

My favourite as far as looks went was the D200, from 1979. I was also able to type reasonably ok on it and used an in house Oracle Pro*C Forms application in my main job as well as monkeying around with rewriting printer queue management scripts for the new AViiON DG/UX system that replaced a pair of MV/8000 AOS beasts.

#Sysadmin #Unix #SerialTerminals