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I'm a young developer, so I've never had the chance to work with on prem servers (and the chances that I will are looking slim), but I've always loved these "wa

by jjice 6y ago

I'm a young developer, so I've never had the chance to work with on prem servers (and the chances that I will are looking slim), but I've always loved these "war" stories.

laurent92 6y ago
In my former service company, the story of the server room which has become much much more important and reliable with massive investment like a diesel generator, but the teams haven’t grown enough in maturity. One day they have a problem with a server. A system admin is granted permission to go to the bay, since remote desktop didn’t work. They discuss the problem in front of the bay. One leans on another bay that was just between two locations. Wheels weren’t locked. It just flew across the room. It was ok, just the power cord and a fee RJ45 torn. No serious damage besides downtime.
jacobsenscott 6y ago
I miss the days when the servers came with seating (Cray).
mike_d 6y ago
You can buy yourself a pair of old Dell servers from craigslist or eBay for a few hundred bucks. With a $200 membership to VMUG Advantage you'll get all the licences you need to build an enterprise grade cluster. Build yourself a home lab and learn how systems work. Figure out what is really running your code. Learn how to resource optimize. Don't end up only being able to work on webapps and small datasets that fit comfortably in the cloud.
- jjice 6y ago
  That's been a plan of mine. Right now, my home server is just a Pi running SMB and Jellyfin, but the plan is to expand into some used hardware. Seems like used server hardware is one hell of a deal.
- aeyes 6y ago
  I'm not sure if this is still valid advice. I'd just stick 64GB of memory in a desktop PC and have the home lab running on VMs. 5 years ago I left a company running loads of enterprise software and web applications for other companies in a couple of data centers. We had well over 10.000 physical machines. When I left, about 90% of the workloads were virtualized. Running on bare metal is the exception today. Sure, its cool to have hot-swap HDDs, hot-swap PSUs, redundant network cards and a remote management board but none of that is rocket science. You can learn it in a week if needed. Networking is a much deeper topic yet almost nobody would recommend you to set up a couple of switches and hardware firewalls in your home network. Today you expect that the hardware just works. In the real world it is extremely complicated to correctly design and run networks, but you aren't going to experience any of these problems in a home lab.
  - Nextgrid 6y ago
    Being able to operate server-grade hardware is a nice skill. There are features in server hardware (like lights-out management, dedicated RAID controllers, etc) that you don't always get in a desktop PC.
  - mike_d 6y ago
    > a couple of switches and hardware firewalls in your home network. Today you expect that the hardware just works. At the end of the day, you need the guy who makes it "just work". That is a valuable skill as well. Also knowing how your application works when you just yank the power cord on half your VMs teaches you a ton.

by jjice 6y ago

I'm a young developer, so I've never had the chance to work with on prem servers (and the chances that I will are looking slim), but I've always loved these "war" stories.

laurent92 6y ago

In my former service company, the story of the server room which has become much much more important and reliable with massive investment like a diesel generator, but the teams haven’t grown enough in maturity. One day they have a problem with a server. A system admin is granted permission to go to the bay, since remote desktop didn’t work. They discuss the problem in front of the bay. One leans on another bay that was just between two locations. Wheels weren’t locked. It just flew across the room. It was ok, just the power cord and a fee RJ45 torn. No serious damage besides downtime.

jacobsenscott 6y ago

I miss the days when the servers came with seating (Cray).

mike_d 6y ago

You can buy yourself a pair of old Dell servers from craigslist or eBay for a few hundred bucks. With a $200 membership to VMUG Advantage you'll get all the licences you need to build an enterprise grade cluster. Build yourself a home lab and learn how systems work. Figure out what is really running your code. Learn how to resource optimize. Don't end up only being able to work on webapps and small datasets that fit comfortably in the cloud.

jjice 6y ago
That's been a plan of mine. Right now, my home server is just a Pi running SMB and Jellyfin, but the plan is to expand into some used hardware. Seems like used server hardware is one hell of a deal.
aeyes 6y ago
I'm not sure if this is still valid advice. I'd just stick 64GB of memory in a desktop PC and have the home lab running on VMs. 5 years ago I left a company running loads of enterprise software and web applications for other companies in a couple of data centers. We had well over 10.000 physical machines. When I left, about 90% of the workloads were virtualized. Running on bare metal is the exception today. Sure, its cool to have hot-swap HDDs, hot-swap PSUs, redundant network cards and a remote management board but none of that is rocket science. You can learn it in a week if needed. Networking is a much deeper topic yet almost nobody would recommend you to set up a couple of switches and hardware firewalls in your home network. Today you expect that the hardware just works. In the real world it is extremely complicated to correctly design and run networks, but you aren't going to experience any of these problems in a home lab.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  Being able to operate server-grade hardware is a nice skill. There are features in server hardware (like lights-out management, dedicated RAID controllers, etc) that you don't always get in a desktop PC.
- mike_d 6y ago
  > a couple of switches and hardware firewalls in your home network. Today you expect that the hardware just works. At the end of the day, you need the guy who makes it "just work". That is a valuable skill as well. Also knowing how your application works when you just yank the power cord on half your VMs teaches you a ton.