Or is that more of a stereotype, and there are some (maybe more?) out there using some form of graphical interfaces/web dashboards/etc.?
It’s struck me as interesting how when you look up info about managing servers that they primarily go through command-line interfaces/terminals/etc. It’s made me wonder how much of that’s preference and how much of it’s an absence of graphical interfaces.
Software engineer here who works on web services. Most production-critical things in our workplace aren’t managed by GUI’s, or command lines… but by code. There are usually some infrastructure-as-code tools involved, like Terraform, CDK or Pulumi.
GUI’s are often reserved for quick fixes and trying out things on staging servers (derisively called “click-ops”).
Chef, Puppet, Ansible, SaltStack, even Otter (for Windows).
For smaller servers/services, they are plenty of admins still getting their hands dirty in a shell (for instance my home lab is a baremetal hypervisor with a few hosts and a whole load of Docker containers).
But in business environments, especially those using cloud providers, infrastructure as code is king.
I’m looking to rise up from the hell desk, I have an enterprise grade server sitting collecting dust at the moment (heat issue, not on the server, just the average ambient temperature is uncomfortable without it running is too much) but its running unraid at the moment and not much else.
Any suggestions on where to start with infrastructure as code?
Google “Terraform homelab” and read a few guides on how to use Proxmox, Terraform, Ansible, Puppet, cloud-init, Packer, etc.
A great starting point is being able to write some code that will consistently build a homelab setup, perhaps running a few useful services like Snapdrop, Pihole, OpenVAS, Etherpad Lite, etc. The goal being capable of standing everything up and tearing it down using Terraform and Proxmox (Terraform instructing Proxmox to create VMs and Ansible to configure those VMs with what you need).
There are loads of similar solutions (such as Ansible and Puppet) so don’t be scared of trying a few different guides and wiping the server a few times along the way. It’ll give you a strong understanding of the various tools and, once you’ve done it a few times, you can land on your preferred setup and start building your own use cases for it all.
Hope this helps!
Much appreciated. Just needed some phrases to throw in a search engine to get started.
It is far from a stereotype, and most times it isn’t personal preference either.
It is just about using the best tool for the job.
Many tasks can be done either this or that way, but one of the ways is usually much faster, or repeatable/scriptable, or easier to make mistakes etc.
It used to be 100% command line. Now it’s 80% shell and 20% web portals.
No it’s legit. Most servers nowadays are Linux so if you’re working on a specific server you are using the command line.
It’s way more efficient generally.
GUI can be great for quick specific tasks but you are limited by the features added by the software.
Speaking from ~20 years experience: Yes, mainly. But both GUIs and web dashboards are common and widespread. It varies wildly based on what type of server you’re maintaining and what type of organization you’re in.
If you run a custom Minecraft server via some online service, you’ll be going through a web dashboard.
Typical corporate or government IT tends to be Windows/GUI based, but of course with as much automation as possible in the form of global policy settings.
Typical small web development shop tends to be via code configuration and web dashboards on rented hosts.
Typical SAAS-provider type company tends to be strictly command-line but as little as possible, and try to have everything via configuration, rules, deployment scripts, etc checked into a version control system.
It’s extremely varied, but to my understanding it is correct that command line is most common.
At my work it’s all command line or inside the code Itself. No need to be scared of the cli.
For a single new problem that hasn’t yet been automated I use CLI utilities to collect information to use to write code for a new automation.
I use web UIs to monitor metrics (grafana) and write custom exporters to collect metrics that can show performance or potential issues and logs.
Depends on the kind of server - Linux, yes, command line all the way. Windows (and Active Directory and other Microsoft stuff) you use GUI mostly in combination with some PowerShell scripts (often running on the “command line”).
Yes, I manage my Raspberry Pi Plex/Pi-Hole/OpenVPN server using command line because, well, it’s Linux.
Also for work I manage Windows Server based systems and although this is a largely GUI based operating system, Command Prompt/Powershell are still tools I use daily to provide more control and depth over what I can do (bulk admin actions, for example).
I don’t really use command line out of preference - moreso because it’s the necessary tool for the job.
GUIs are very limiting. You’re only able to do what the designer wants you to be able to. By using the terminal it’s much simpler to do more complicated tasks (once you’ve gotten past the learning curve).
Also since so many servers are headless (no display outputs) they’ll be remotely logged into, meaning there’s only a terminal to interface with the machine.
You can’t really do configuration management with a GUI. Or version control. Everything I do I manage with Ansible as much as possible. YAML is self-documenting as well. How much effort is ‘run command with parameter’ documentation vs explaining how to navigate a GUI?
As others mentioned, it depends on the details. But anything routine should be done with CLI or code, because then it can be scripted/automated. The time savings for that adds up surprisingly quickly, especially when you consider the human errors that are avoided.
You can accomplish a lot through scripting - light programming. Anything you can type into a command line can also be executed by a script. This is the power of them. So when managing large arrays of resources, the potential for automation and scaling effort is big.
I don’t think all of that can be replaced with GUIs. When you consider that sysadmins are working with tons of different software from many different providers and trying to make it all work together, the command line interface is really the common language they all share - even the bulllshit legacy products that are still hanging around after 15 years of being outdated. You’d need extremely sophisticated GUI tools to be able to do everything, across all these products, at scale.
There are of course GUI tools for specific tasks, but the command line is the foundational tool.
I work with embedded devices, and to some degree also servers. Graphical user interfaces are usually ignored as they just take up space and resources, and you can’t even do half of what you can in the terminal (assuming you know your way around a terminal, but being a server admin, you really should).
Web interfaces are usually used for status pages, or if anyone who isn’t you or a fellow admin needs to to anything as, you guessed it, they are very restrictive, so the other party hopefully can’t do much damage.
If you are managing linux servers and you need to go into them for whatever reason, then using ssh is common and you will use a terminal to do so. There are some web interfaces for other things like managing a virtual machine cluster for creating virtual machines, set up network configurations for the cluster, etc.
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