Nailed it. I think about this a lot: a sysadmin is basically a manager of dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of computers. But management is a poor way of orchestrating human labor; small teams usually operate better without management. So, is there a better way to administer computer systems as well?
That's a really interesting question, I don't know what that might look like.
As a biochemist, my brain naturally goes to the different hierarchical levels of increasing complexity in life. Like how eukaryotic amoebas are freed from some of the challenges that constrain bacteria (mitochondria really are awesome), and how similarly, the complexity ceiling is much higher for multicellular life than unicellular life.
I just think a systems view of stuff is neat, and it's cool to see how modularisation, coupling and specialisation work together
Since computers, unlike humans, lack intuition, I doubt that computers could organise themselves. So there probably always has to be a sysadmin, even if the sysadmin is a computer themself.
This is the best part when you finish setting up your server. I was so happy when I can access my backup files and my media server I want to setup Home Assistant one day for a local, private smart home
Oh!! Haha I didn’t realize that until I read it again 😅 That’s a confusing sentence if you read it the other way. I wonder if there’s a name for sentences that change meaning as you read/hear the later part of the sentence.
When I had a ceph cluster setup with a star network of routed gigabit connections between servers I was giddy with excitement watching the throughput, and even more excited when I spotted one of the cables was bad and only able to pass traffic in one direction but the routing protocol still used the available bandwidth and work around the bad link in the opposite direction.