Sysadmining Like It's 2009 (opens in new tab)

I'm really pleased he's embraced long form videos showing the steps (and the failures) along the way, in the early videos you can hear he's apprehensive about if people would find it interesting in a world of short form content.

He also has really great editing where he'll sometimes show the success of a step first if it's a long journey to keep interest and then go back through the details so you can tell he's put care into the production.

I also enjoy his humourous Paul Thurrott-like jabs at himself and the problems he hits too, it feels like he has a nice humility about himself.

It kills me that it never occurred to me there would be a market for videos of re-living the work I did from 1997 on. I could have made a ton of 'content' about that.

clabretro does it all on hardmode too. Picks the most obscure, esoteric shit to try and get working: IBM i was the most recent, but his AT&T Merlin Phone series was great. I feel like the Sun Ray stuff was the most likely to be you know, actually documented in a way meant for mere mortals to read, and still likely to be hosted somewhere accessible.

The IBM i stuff, my god, the acronyms, the terse and unhelpful menus and error messages, the insane lengths to get a simple goddamn serial console, it's no wonder IBM gets paid to handle it all for you.

more to come :)

Imo vistas biggest problem was they underspecced the minimum system requirements. Most peoples experience with vista was on sub 1gb of ram machines with a single core, no gpu and 32 bits. Vista was an os for modern architectures first. Windows 7 had the luxury of those features being the default at launch.

It's fun running into Vista references in contemporary TV shows, which run the gamut from "it's like a good pair of jeans" [1] to "Vista! We're going to die!" [2]. I was too young to form much of an opinion on it, but I remember it feeling quite unstable. I can say I preferred Windows 8 to Windows 7, though.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Paw-EKCw_3o&t=86s

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IfnjBHtjHc

Same. I think the UX changes plus the 32/64 bit issues led it to have a rocky start.

IMO, Vista crawled so Win7 could run. Same with Win 2000 and WinXP.

Vista helped a lot of people switch to Mac, first to run windows XP on it, then slowly switch to Mac more permanently.

I have one Linux -> Windows migration story that went really well. Early-2000s, I worked for a company that printed massive amounts of data and shipped it to clients. The data had to be printed and shipped, digital delivery wasn't an option at the time (legal BS). The Unix/Linux sysadmins were using a Linux box as a print server, having trouble getting a newly purchased, super expensive printer to print correctly. They worked on this "project" for weeks. The printer manufacturer didn't have a Linux driver and wasn't going to make one, so the internal team was trying to write their own. Finally, I told them to just use Windows as the print server; the Windows drivers are right there on the company website. The idea received relentless pushback: Windows can't handle the load. Our automation uses Unix-only protocols (ftp) to copy the data to the print server. Windows is too expensive. Finally, I took an old desktop PC, installed Windows 2000, added all the required printers, including the new, expensive printer. Installed all the manufacturers' drivers. Then I installed ftp, added the matching auth credentials, and it was done. The whole process took me, maybe, 2 hours. Naturally the sysadmins that owned this process were pissed; they hated it. But their boss loved it and it became the solution. Linux -> Windows FTW.

Microsoft's recent track record with Windows 11 seems to have kickstarted another Win -> Linux migration wave.

dos was the reason i switched to linux. (sorry, i could not resist, i am old ;-)

7 was fine, but in retrospect it was a bit of a dead cat bounce.

> But yes 2009 was a different time, to be a sysadmin all you had to effectively know was how to reinstall an OS and drivers and you were golden.

I got a lot of good business from helping small businesses recover from "sysadmins" who only knew how to reinstall the OS and drivers. I owe a lot to them. (So many bad Active Directory environments... So many ill-conceived attempts at using Group Policy, network segmentation, lack of understanding 802.1x, etc...)

2009 was right at the cusp of "cattle not pets" mindset, and many ways a transitional time from physical servers to virtual servers to disposable single-app VMs.

An excellent point, I'm not opposed to using Windows 7 to work around those problems, or make the lab more homogeneous.

I just want an excuse to use my Vista netbook for a couple of months, even if it's going to cause me problems!

That was precisely my thinking behind doing this. I don't get to deploy server core particularly often so building a lab around using it specifically felt cool, but all of the processes/methodologies around deploying those systems carries forward well enough.

Your Syteline experience mirrors mine haha, but since it's a lab I'm hoping I won't run into too many errors.

It's happened!