Not today, but recently at work, I, a DevOps engineer specializing in Linux and other Unix/Unix-like systems, was given the task of doing some admin and maintenance work on a few Windows servers…
I FUCKING HATE WINDOWS
THIS OS MAKES NO SENSE AND ADMINISTERING IT IS A NIGHTMARE
Upgrading/reinstalling some company specific software (it’s an absolute mess, we essentially build our own tools for everything in C++, there’s probably a quadrillion memory vulnerabilities and the software crashes all the time), because random people on the Windows team have been tinkering with the config over the years, and now essentially everything is broken and has to be reinstalled. We have been shipping newer versions of our software to customers than we were running internally… (of course it was tested in the staging environment, but our prod was pretty unmaintained and messy) I’m so glad that I’m usually on the Linux team… I was a software engineer before, but I was tired of C++ and the weird way we do things, so I was probably the first one who asked to move to the newly formed Linux team, when we started slowly migrating away from Windows around 6 or 7 years ago. Unfortunately like half of the Windows team recently quit or was laid off, so they had to find someone who could do this. Since I was a dev before, I’m quite familiar with our internal tools. I’m now working with 3 Windows guys on fixing this insanity. The entire process is not quite as bad as it sounds, but I really don’t want to touch a Windows system ever again in my life.
Sorry to hear that, it originally sounded like I might be able to help with some scripts but cleaning up the org is definitely going to be work. Stay strong
it originally sounded like I might be able to help with some scripts
Thanks man, I still appreciate it a lot
I feel like I just need to clarify some things. In my initial comment, I was bashing Microsoft, not because it’s their fault that my company has such a messy environment and workflows, but because the way Windows Server works is just stupid. Since there’s no proper shell (PowerShell is absolute garbage), everyone on the Windows team uses fucking RDP to log in to the server… Most of the stuff can’t be reasonably done through a CLI, and requires using the stupid GUI wizards. Configurations can’t be replicated as easily, since I can’t just use scp to copy a config file, I actually need to go through the stupid GUI wizard again. Active Directory is a huge mess that’s been held together by hopes and prayers over the past few decades, and I hope it dies sooner rather than later. Also fuck my company’s stupid decisions from 20 years ago… Integrating some stupid Windows/Microsoft specific stuff into all of our products was not the best idea, and they realized this a few years ago. Now we have a huge amount of technical debt though, and it will take decades to get everything ported over.
Preach! I got onboarded to a team with 31 other SRES and 2 weeks in I realized that I was doing all their jobs in Linux solo. The things got helped my team before I got there: octopus deploy’s “run script on host” it’s not too different from invoke command -computername “”, but Active directory :vomit: and security locked down most of the useful tools, so they used octo runbooks instead (also vomit but you do get tools back in the remote UI) but it’s setup with tentacles w/ identifiable ssh keys so it skips ad. It also lets you set env variable libraries.
Move configs to dev repos and make them set/read their own yaml/json, for some reason windows shops didn’t get that memo. Royal TSX is a decent rdp client that you can script host lists and store prod/dev credentials, ours is basically just knife node list | sort windirstat is a GUI replacement for du - *. The light at the end of the tunnel is when you drop the codebase in a windows container and just remove all of the iis mess/instability for container management.
Right now we are trying to figure out bootstrapping. In order to provision a new host we need to reboot the box 2x for ad and one for the app stack. We think we can remove the hostname assignment, but AD shakes fist… it’s kinda pointless targeting an automated step, when it needs manual intervention later anyways.
Not today, but recently at work, I, a DevOps engineer specializing in Linux and other Unix/Unix-like systems, was given the task of doing some admin and maintenance work on a few Windows servers…
I FUCKING HATE WINDOWS
THIS OS MAKES NO SENSE AND ADMINISTERING IT IS A NIGHTMARE
FUCK MICROSOFT!
I used to work in IT.
Having to make promises about things with so many uncertain variables was really bad for my mental health.
Don’t forget about ChatGPT, which is pretty good about giving (mostly accurate) answers to tech questions.
What’s your task? I’ve supported quite a few systems
Upgrading/reinstalling some company specific software (it’s an absolute mess, we essentially build our own tools for everything in C++, there’s probably a quadrillion memory vulnerabilities and the software crashes all the time), because random people on the Windows team have been tinkering with the config over the years, and now essentially everything is broken and has to be reinstalled. We have been shipping newer versions of our software to customers than we were running internally… (of course it was tested in the staging environment, but our prod was pretty unmaintained and messy) I’m so glad that I’m usually on the Linux team… I was a software engineer before, but I was tired of C++ and the weird way we do things, so I was probably the first one who asked to move to the newly formed Linux team, when we started slowly migrating away from Windows around 6 or 7 years ago. Unfortunately like half of the Windows team recently quit or was laid off, so they had to find someone who could do this. Since I was a dev before, I’m quite familiar with our internal tools. I’m now working with 3 Windows guys on fixing this insanity. The entire process is not quite as bad as it sounds, but I really don’t want to touch a Windows system ever again in my life.
Sorry to hear that, it originally sounded like I might be able to help with some scripts but cleaning up the org is definitely going to be work. Stay strong
Thanks man, I still appreciate it a lot
I feel like I just need to clarify some things. In my initial comment, I was bashing Microsoft, not because it’s their fault that my company has such a messy environment and workflows, but because the way Windows Server works is just stupid. Since there’s no proper shell (PowerShell is absolute garbage), everyone on the Windows team uses fucking RDP to log in to the server… Most of the stuff can’t be reasonably done through a CLI, and requires using the stupid GUI wizards. Configurations can’t be replicated as easily, since I can’t just use scp to copy a config file, I actually need to go through the stupid GUI wizard again. Active Directory is a huge mess that’s been held together by hopes and prayers over the past few decades, and I hope it dies sooner rather than later. Also fuck my company’s stupid decisions from 20 years ago… Integrating some stupid Windows/Microsoft specific stuff into all of our products was not the best idea, and they realized this a few years ago. Now we have a huge amount of technical debt though, and it will take decades to get everything ported over.
Preach! I got onboarded to a team with 31 other SRES and 2 weeks in I realized that I was doing all their jobs in Linux solo. The things got helped my team before I got there: octopus deploy’s “run script on host” it’s not too different from invoke command -computername “”, but Active directory :vomit: and security locked down most of the useful tools, so they used octo runbooks instead (also vomit but you do get tools back in the remote UI) but it’s setup with tentacles w/ identifiable ssh keys so it skips ad. It also lets you set env variable libraries.
Move configs to dev repos and make them set/read their own yaml/json, for some reason windows shops didn’t get that memo. Royal TSX is a decent rdp client that you can script host lists and store prod/dev credentials, ours is basically just
knife node list | sortwindirstat is a GUI replacement fordu - *. The light at the end of the tunnel is when you drop the codebase in a windows container and just remove all of the iis mess/instability for container management.Right now we are trying to figure out bootstrapping. In order to provision a new host we need to reboot the box 2x for ad and one for the app stack. We think we can remove the hostname assignment, but AD shakes fist… it’s kinda pointless targeting an automated step, when it needs manual intervention later anyways.