What is your SysAdmin "hot take".

I have learned the hard way to write every script that's going to be used non-trivially as if I, personally, will have to debug it in five years. Exception handling, modular functions, logs, config files, blah blah. Makes my life way, way easier down the line.

My hot take is that the relationships you build - and how easy you are to work with - are more important than your skillset.

cd c:\users\bob\temp

del *.*

consider what happens if the change directory fails for any reason. not all situations are like this, but i don't want to spend time wondering if there are any edge cases I haven't thought of

edit - to be clear, the commands above are just a very simple example of why monitoring failure and using flow control can be important. this is not a good way to actually do anything or meant to be an example of anything more than that idea.

As someone who’s been in IT being right isn’t enough. Soft skills are important and in a lot of circumstances if you can’t bring people along with you then it doesn’t matter how right you are. Seen so many posts on here devolve into slanging matches and pissing contests. Yeah you might be right but if you’re a dick I’m not going to want to agree with you.

This is my hot take based on how my day's going.

You cannot have a help desk full of non-technical or new to the field people who report to non-technical leads who report to non-technical managers. That is a call center with extra steps. If the first technical link in the chain is an escalation engineer then your model has failed.

gartner is bullsh*t

Apparently my hot take is that you don't need to reply "This" to comments you agree with.

For some decisions i make the "scream test", we just do the thing that needs to get done, and if nobody comes screaming to our office it is called a success

At least you know that one's bad.

My hottest take shows my greybeardness, that this piece from 2013 continues to largely be more and more relevant.

Apple made technology too superficially accessible with the popularity of the iPhone and iPad. There's an ever increasing number of people who think they know way more about tech than they do. Digital nativism is fucking bullshit, entirely too many recent high school and college graduates have zero clue how business computing works. Because everything is so easy, no one ever figures they have to try anything. It's been made to look much easier than it is so when something doesn't work and there's no big colorful button to look at, they don't know what to do. That's what I mean by "superficially accessible" - everyone has tech but even more people don't know how to actually do much with it.

Certainly not everyone but far more than we should have with the attempts to include technology in education. Hell, my 9 year old had to make PowerPoint presentations on his fucking school-issued iPad this past school year.

Old man done yelling at cloud. But at least I understand how the goddamn cloud works.

EDIT: Since people seem to be missing the point, understanding computers and understanding business computing (which I've bolded so it's harder to miss) aren't the same thing. If you don't know the difference, you might be one of the people I'm talking about.

EDIT2: A disturbing number of people seem to not understand (or are just ignoring) the difference between knowing computers and knowing business computing. Expecting people be able to navigate a file share, read an error message that comes up on the screen, and know that things generally need to be plugged in to work is not the same as expecting people to be able to tear down a computer and replace parts, create a new LUN on a SAN, or create a VLAN.

Your take is fine until it leads to something taking down a production system because the script wasn't written with any type of verification or error checking in it.

Most software developers are terrible sysadmins despite the fact that many of them speak on the subject as if experts.

Never trust developers when it comes to anything remotely networking related.

Lava take:

I have no issues with printers. Maintain the firmware, throw them on papercut, update the drivers every so often. Treat them how you would a car, they are an expensive device to maintain (and many of them have clutches), so be proactive about it. Have your print vendor come in for once or twice a year PMs to clean them out. This is SUPER important for high-end scanning equipment by default, like $10k desk fujitsu scanners. Quit buying consumer-grade trash. Would you buy a d-link switch from Best Buy/Staples/OfficeMax to run your 400-person company? No? Then quit buying printers there.

~100 large and small papercut-compatible badge scan devices here, we maybe have 2-3 notable outages during the year. The rest is just generic maintenance.

I have the opposite problem. When I write bash scripts I tend to go all out with error checking, portability, and command line options. 99% of the time it is wasted effort, but I oddly enjoy it.

SFC is the most underrated utility in the world.

Most of the people in r/sysadmin aren't sysadmins.

I don't mind the users that are not IT savvy. It's because of them I'll always have a job.

Ive taken to adding logging to even my most simple scripts and it’s worth it

Spoken like someone who hasn't been burned by erasing or otherwise screwing up important shit because even though the folder shouldn't have been there it was and the script didn't account for this.

My hot take:

It's a service job. Yes, you know more about a specific tech than most other people in your building, yes, you are a rockstar, and yes, it's still a service job and ignoring that means you're failing at it.

The most magical words you can utter are: "Is there anything else I can help with, while I'm here?".

Also, DO NOT treat people like idiots for simple mistakes. You can think whatever you want, but DO NOT treat them like that. Everyone makes simple mistakes. Be kind and be happy that the issue was easily resolved.

It's easier to weaponize incompetence than it is to correct a mistake.

Yeah, who needs to actually make sure assumptions are correct before running a destructive command, right? Who cares if you obliterate /boot or /dev right?

One of the first things you learn in coding, validate input and cope with exceptions. Scripts are no exception from the rule.

A lot of IT professionals have an ego problem. A lot have the same temperament as cops and are looking for any excuse to use their station to power trip over their end users.

The reason a lot of IT gets a bad rap, and that a lot of IT has a bad relationship with end users, is because some of you are raging narcissistic assholes.

I ran an installer script (sh file) from a very reputable source to install some backup software (l0l) on my Ubuntu machine. I use ZSH, with a few plugins like oh-my-zsh for some easy shortcuts. I ran that script in my homedir, as I did with any installer so it would either install right there, ready for me to move to /opt or whatever, or it would make cleanup of the install sh file easier.

Turns out they didn’t anticipate anything other than Bash, with some “”””basic”””” environment variables. Which were not all set on my machine. They script like you and never checked anything, and it recursively deleted my entire home directory.

Thankfully I just finished my thesis and uploaded it to school literally 6 days before. If I ran that installer a week earlier I would not have had any version. (As I was trying to install backup software to fix this exact issue)

TL;DR check and let your scripts check, or you’ll ruin someone’s day months or years into the future

I'll take a mid tech with good soft skills over an expert.

A competently designed GUI negates the need for most CLI interfaces and the massive amount of training needed to get good with CLI and scripting. A modern firewall, for instance, should not need a CLI to setup and an average person should be able to read hot tips and figure out doing a basic setup. GUI design has gone to ABSOLUTE SHIT.

The connection between Knowbe4 and Scientology is to much for me. I wouldn’t trust them with anything.

just GIT, used correctly If i see one more backup folder in a git repo i quit

People do this to avoid loops where scripts get stuck in a error loop and can't complete because it can't do the function that its supposed to do. Error checking is there for a reason. While you might not have come across needing to use it, it still serves a purpose.

In more complex scripts, this can cause a hard crash of the system. I know because I've done it a few times in school.

I think iops is a stupid metric to measure storage speed with.

Be fucking nice to your end users. You likely can't do their jobs any better than they could do yours.

It’s hard to match your hot take cause it’s so wrong cause you don’t understand why yet. Don’t worry, it’ll come, just takes one mistake and one angry person to teach you why “best practices” exist.

Most sysadmins are bad at understanding their role in the business and spend too much time focusing on the how instead of the why. 

Protip - make sure you understand how your company makes money and what your role is in that ecosystem. Things like: Are you a cost center or are you revenue generating? What are the companies strategic projects and objectives? Where do you fit in the market? Who are your competitors? In general, the closer you are to the money the better you are treated. Truly understanding these things requires soft skills that many don't have or don't care to cultivate. 

Macs aren't that bad, a lot of sysadmins are just too lazy to learn a different platform.

Most companies are just wasting money chasing high availability for the sake of high availability. Low time to restore is vastly superior in large swaths of cases.

Linux is a perfectly valid OS to use on the desktop. It's actually less painful to use than Windows at this point. Which brings me to...

Printers aren't hard to work with. Windows is. Most of your printer issues where you just can't print for some unknown reason is just Windows being shit.

VMWare was garbage before Broadcom bought it.

Having your systems on a 4 or 5 year refresh cycle is just pissing money away. Modern x86 hardware is far more powerful than most office environments will need.

If you are still using Windows, you shouldn't be mapping network drives. I don't care how much the users are used to them. Most ransomware isn't smart enough to cross a shortcut into your file server. But boy howdy, they will traverse a mapped drive. Oh, that reminds me...

Getting your shit crypto'd and then paying the ransom because it's cheaper than executing your DR plan means (among other things) that your DR plan has failed.

This is why I used to use ansible religiously... For simple stuff it handles that for you and spits out a list of which servers failed and why.

Like creating a folder or something like that. If "such and such folder already exists" is the result of running the command then perfect! That's exactly what I want. I don't need to check to see if it exists first

I think when I was at an earlier stage of scripting, I was mostly on the same page. As I developed more complicated scripts, and especially as I put together anything to be used by other people, I started to understand more.

Maybe you need logging. Maybe you need the script to do something differently when XYZ fails. Maybe you want notifications/alerts when a step fails. There are plenty of reasons to use try/catch blocks, or if/then/else statements. It just depends on what you are doing.

Last one... the solution to a bad situation at work isn’t always “find a new job”. So many threads where someone is moaning about a situation at work that could probably be resolved with a 3 minute phone call. I assume a lot of this is purely projection from people who wish they could quit their job but can’t.

Storing seemingly vital scripts in C:\temp.

I think a lot of IT people can be hypocrites when they use their admin permissions, privileged access, access to hardware and servers, etc. to set up their perfect environment that makes them more productive at their own job, but when they get a request from a user for something that would improve their workflow they laugh them out of the room or find an excuse to say no ("sorry, policy says so.").

I am not saying you should entertain every user request that comes in because yes, many of them are impractical or nonsensical. But it feels like such a slap in the face when the simple requests that can go a long way in making a user feel more productive at their job get met with an attitude of "you don't need that to do your job even if you think you do, I know exactly what you need and you'll be getting the bare minimum you need to do it" all while IT has theirs set up exactly the way they like it.

Scripting and cli management are two entirely separate things, OP. Please be more specific, because logic is absolutely necessary when scripting, otherwise you’re just building bombs for other admins.

People on this forum complain way too much about this industry and need to gain some perspective. We have it pretty nice

My take is so hot it'll probably ignite a flame war right here and now:

"Enterprise-grade" is more often than not a meaningless buzzword, and even when it's not it's usually overkill for small and medium orgs. In most cases, buying "enterprise" hardware or software just means paying 5× what you would for equivalent "consumer" hardware for the sake of, at best, features the org will never ever use (and at worst, the vendor simply slapping "enterprise" branding on the "consumer" product).

Hot Take: You do not need to write a script for everything. There are times when logging into the GUI is flat out faster then you writing something from scratch.

Sysadmin/IT, but My hot take is that people who are charged with using computers as part of their job function should be at least competent with computers upon hiring.

If I get a certain number of tickets from the same user in accounting about basic excel functions, I should be able to trigger a skills review.

Cloud is highly overrated and the market is going to crash hard next recession.

IPv6 sucks.

I have no problem with the idea of needing new address space to address v4 exhaustion. But the way they designed v6 is not conducive to picking it up easily, and the people (cough developers cough) who barely understand v4 as it is will never be able to figure it out.

Culture is top down. Not bottom up.

90% of our jobs is data work

1. Integrating - ETL, moving bits from one place to another (backups, account provisioning, etc etc)
   

2. Reporting - (security audits etc)

3. documentation (telling people how to move between these systems)

Ive got 2 hot takes.

Script comments should be documenting what the script is trying to do so if you come along later you know WHY you are deleting C:\users\bob\temp\*

Second hot take. Developers should understand how networking works on a basic level before they are allowed to make products.

Like if it says host not found please dont call the FW team.

Scheduled password expiration is security theater that is worse than nothing.

Phishing training and testing is theatre.

Every one of us knows the user in Payroll, AP or HR that will fail if a real phishing attempt happened. We know nothing will happen after they fail. I send out a quarterly email with details on the latest scams.

Insurance makes me test and train but don't say how many users I need to do so I do 5 a year and report %100 success rate.

Reposting to shittysysadmin

My hot take: security is, at best, a tertiary concern.

If the more secure way hurts profits (directly or indirectly) or it trods upon some arbitrary convenience threshold, it will not be implemented.

Paying for a warranty from one of the big server names (Dell, HP) makes no sense unless you are spending 7+ figures a year on hardware and/or getting major discounts (and also probably at a server count where the man power on direct upkeep is impractical).

Last time I spec'ed an epyc Genoa system with 512GB ram and several micron 7450 pros, the Dell cost was literally 3x, parting it out with a barebones asus chassis. At the 3x difference, I can run 2 servers in a high availability config and still have a hot spare vs relying on a single server with a "4 hr Dell parts replacement" warranty.

Like creating a folder or something like that. If "such and such folder already exists" is the result of running the command then perfect! That's exactly what I want. I don't need to check to see if it exists first

Our original OG person wrote all sorts of scripts like this and now our legacy prod system is a nightmare to troubleshoot, and silently fails all the time.

We've been slowly migrating out, but the whole, "when will this ever actually matter" attitude is something that wouldn't have been ok back when I managed teams.

I'm not saying you need to over engineer everything, but that scenario you're talking about, you can't predict in the future why you might want to know why that directory didn't exist, if you were thinking it would, or why did it exist, if you were thinking it shouldn't.

Also, a short if of

directory does not exist, create

Really isn't hat hard and doesn't require a ton more effort

DevOps and Agile methodologies as implemented by a majority of companies; not as implemented as designed. Do more harm than good for companies and employees by both rapidly burning out good Admins and Engineers and forcing them down a career trajectory they didnt intend to go down. If they wanted to get into Development they would have chosen that over Administration and Engineering.

Hot take: You don't have to be passionate to be successful. It can just be a job.

Virtual machines have existed since their development started in the 1950s and implementation in the 1960s.

Email (and the Internet) has existed in one form or another since the 1970s.

Microsoft Office products have existed since the 1980s.

If you're going to pull out the "I'm old and I don't know about these new fangled computer things" card... you'd better be as old as dirt, because chances are good that if you're not retired, the thing you're proud of being ignorant of, is probably older than you.

I had this one boss I hated. I hate him to this day but he gave me one ounce of wisdom I use constantly.

Most people that aren't in IT come to IT with a solution rather than their problem.

So when they do that we often either give them what they ask for (which may not actually solve the problem) or only solves their problem, not the whole problem as it relates to everyone else in the office that may need the same system or platform altered.

Revisiting the entire solution for all parties can sometimes yield much better results and do so without a lot of headache when you vivisect something out of infrastructure and replace it with something everyone is enthusiastic about.

I will hate that man until the day he dies - but that ounce of wisdom has done me very, very well since I quit working for him.

TLDR:

Don't give people what they ask for, ask them what the problem is and see if there are more solutions out there.

1) A former coworker used to say, "95% of I.T. gives the rest of us a bad name.". While I'd argue with the number, sometimes I think he might have been on to something.

2) Personally, I can accept it if someone is arrogant or ignorant, but not both of those things at the same time.

3) I forget where I heard this NSFW quote, but... "Documentation is like sex. When is good, it's very, very good. And when it's bad, it's still better than nothing."

4) Never be the only one to know something. That isn't job security. It's just a way to make sure you burn out.

5) Don't just optimize for efficiency, cost, etc. Optimize for maintainability and ease of understanding. Current You is smart, but Future You has no idea what you were thinking when you designed or coded that thing. And your coworkers will have no freaking idea what to do.

6) Build everything in a way that you're replaceable. It allows you to move on to other interesting things, let's you take vacations, and actually makes people more impressed with your value to them as a coworker.

The amount of people in IT who fail to understand how macOS works, refuse to learn, and just hate it because "dur hur Apple sucks" are not tech people. They are microsoft fanboys and that is only because they grew up nursing on the teet of MS Windows. They dont understand technology, they are glorified console jockeys with extra steps.

When in doubt restart.

Click-ops arent Sysadmins.

They're like Medical Assistants and not actual Doctors.