Sysadmin Mega Thread

Software & Operating Systems
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Welcome to the Sysadmin Megathread

If you are a sysadmin or are interested in systems administration, this is the place for you. All are welcome, from homelab-hobbyist to senior security analyst.

Come here to talk about your work as a sysadmin, bounce ideas off other sysadmins, post sysadmin memes and generally talk shop. While this thread is in the Software & Operating Systems category, discussing related topics, like hardware, is completely fine.

Guidelines

This is a mega-thread so the scope of discussion is broad and platform-agnostic. Intel, ARM, AMD, Nvidia, Linux, Windows, BSD, macOS, etc. all fall under our aegis, and ideological loyalty to one over another is the mark of an amateur. The reality is that they are all equally worthless without our oversight.

This thread is not a help-desk. If you have a specific technical question or issue, start a separate thread or use one of the small problem threads. Most of us here monitor forum categories that correspond to our expertise, but if you have trouble getting quality responses, posting a link to your help desk thread/post here is acceptable.

Troubleshooting may emerge naturally in conversation which is fine. If it begins to dominate the thread, flag it or ask a leader or mod to split it into its own thread.

Small Problem Threads

Other Thoughts

Up to this point, a lot of high-quality sysadmin discussion occurred privately between leaders and mods. This wasn’t intentional, but was simply the side-effect of having a lot of knowledgeable people in those positions. We acknowledge that it is much better if these discussions are open to the forum, and that is the ultimate purpose of this thread.

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Obligatory cringy first post IT Guy meme:

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I was thinking of trying out xcp-ng. Does anyone here use it?

I feel like it might be a good middle ground between proxmox and ovirt as far as complexity goes…

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Nope. I haven’t played with xen at all

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Does hardware/config talk about (SAN) Switches and the like also belong here?

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I’m fine keeping it really broad for now. We can narrow it down if it becomes an issue.

What’s up with your SAN switches?

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Just asking.

I and a friend made the network for our student organized LAN (2 each year) wich we had some trouble with. Avaya switches are… funky CLI wise to say the least.
Our Quanta LB4M’s were a breeze to set up in comparison.

Network topo

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As our “field test” with 10G fiber went pretty well, I would like to extend the degree to wich we use it. This includes writing lengthy proposals for new/used hardware we could buy and thinking it through again and again.
Money is tight for student representetives.

That said, Dell, HP and Cisco gear used is borderline affordable, new is way out of reach.
Netgear, Ubiquiti and Mikrotik is what I looked at so far. And of what I found, the Mikrotik CRS317 as a core switch and Mikrotik CSS326 for edge/table use look worth it from a price/feature/performance perspective.

Another plan is to add WLAN access points to the network to better accommodate notebooks. I have no clue what works (Ubiquiti has some decent offerings, I think?), just that money is limited.

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Proxmox has a bad rap because most users don’t understand enough about Linux storage. Imo

There’s an Oracle hypervisor based on xen. Purely for that reason I’ve never tried xen again.

Yes please.

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Yay.

Have any of you worked with KVM professionally? I’m trying to setup a fail over and having a hard time finding documentation on that.

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Myself and a lot of others here have a lot of experience with Ubiquiti. There are also some who use Mikrotik. Afaik, those are the 2 most recommended for budget networks. Netgear and others do have some compelling gear, but personally, I like to try and keep my lan locked to a single vendor as much as I can.

For used 10G switches in a SAN, you want to watch out for latency (@wendell mentioned this recently in a video recently).

Can you cluster proxmox? I always ruled it out because I thought it was inherently standalone.

Just to be clear, you’re talking about a fault-tolerant VM or a KVM switch?

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Whoops, yeah lmao.

I want to have a replica fail over in the event the primary goes down. I’ve done it with Hyper-V, and had great success. KVM is tricky in this respect.

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Afaik fault tolerance is not something you could spin up yourself with just qemu/kvm. I’m not even sure ovirt has true fault tolerance…

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No. If I wasn’t alone at work and severely outnumbered ( window team vs nix team) I might could talk them into getting away from vsphere. I might still try to make it happen just for the rhel systems… Once they hire someone else to help me.

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:disappointed: That’s what I was afraid of. I had some people recommend crazy hacks but it didn’t seem like it would work in the event of something going down. It was more like “Have this ready and when it does go down change all the DNS and IP info”

:smirk: Yeah thanks lmao

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Have you checked out how ovirt and proxmox do it?

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No, I will look into that.

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Hell yeah

That’s actually one of its main advantages out of the box… How fast you can set up a cluster.

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@AnotherDev

I think this is what you want. “Kemari”

https://wiki.qemu.org/Features/FaultTolerance

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Hi, I’m adubs and I am a windows environment user.

For the past 3 years I have been managing a 2012 r2 server with 27 windows 10 clients. My life has hit an all time low. I tried to install ubuntu on a retired server but it just became a nas.

Oh, this isnt AA for sysadmins?

shit.

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