“HN” for Sysadmins?

Some subreddits are OK like /r/sysadmin. However I find that many communities suffer from a snarky mentality. People who thinik they know everything responding negatively or belittling people who ask questions instead of just answering it. I haven't described it well but I'm sure you know what I'm talking about.

The problem with all of these HN for "X" solutions is that HN has lots of stuff in it that is not focused on webdev, startups, and programming and often that stuff is among the most popular.

But of technical issues webdev, startups, and programming do have a bonus it seems.

So if I were going to make an HN for sysadmins I would just make something that took everything from HN but if it were detected that it was of especial interest to Sysadmins it had a bonus time on the front page or perhaps a default +2 points when posted - how to detect? Perhaps see if the link is being discussed in any of the more sysadmin focused sites already mentioned here?

I'm somewhat taken aback by the number of references to r/sysadmin in this thread. Honestly, I come to HN to escape the hole of suck that is reddit(imho), and have been idly hoping to find other communities like HN. I was excited to see this Ask thread, thought to myself "finally, maybe another site will be discovered..."

Sad to see it is not happening, but I'm not sure what to do about it - like most people I don't have time or inclination to create a site and hustle it over the hump and reach critical mass. what to do!?

I guess I would regard myself as a sysadmin, though the term has greatly fallen out of favour and people prefer "DevOps" or "SRE" these days (and sysadmin is synonymous with Windows Admins who just click boxes or field simple tickets all day, the stuff that sysadmins used to automate away).

So, finding places for DevOps and SRE's is advised, as that's where most of the sysadmins are.

I love HN because despite the bias for software development and entrepreneurship, the content - both links and comments - is pretty diverse. The users here truly come from all walks of life. For me the HN is great exactly because most content isn't directly relevant to me professionally, it's a source for a lot of information that probably will not reach me in other ways, but still benefits me in many ways.

An HN for Sysadmins will probably be just another r/sysadmin.

r/sysadmin primarily but it's not that great.

Unfortunately a lot of what used to make this area great has slowly died... IRC being the loss felt most keenly. It still "alive" and a few folks like my self still hang out in various channels but it's nothing like it was when I was getting started. Mailing lists being the other one, certain dev lists and network groups are still really active and frequented by folks that run the big NOCs but also in a sharp decline.

Some of it's being replaced by random Slack instances but this is shit.

Unsure what can be done other than try bootstrap a community.

Probably not like HN but probably more useful to a sysadmin would be ServerFault [1] Casual or off topic discussion is discouraged which makes it much different than HN or Reddit.

[1] - https://serverfault.com/

sysadmins are kind of a dying breed where what's left at this point is mostly split into either the IT sector (which seems like it's mainly Windows admins and MSPs supporting small businesses) or the programming side of things with "DevOps" and "SRE" and other neo-admin nonsense. So personally I just mostly hang out in programming focused spaces or just general tech communities like a couple imageboards.

Sadly, the neo-admin sphere really isn't the same as sysadmin, because the culture is just entirely different. Granted I'm way too young to have been there for the good old days (God I should have just become a programmer) but from what I've seen of it, sysadmins had this individualistic old school tech culture that almost bordered on being kind of punk rock. Back then solving the problems required of an admin was something that could be done with shell scripts or Perl, so each individual sysadmin could have their own bespoke suite of scripts they'd written all on their own, but as time has gone on and the tech industry has exploded, suddenly everything supposedly has to be able to infinitely scale up. Everything becomes more homogenized and there's no longer any room for a BOFH type character rebelling against middle management and the corporate world, because his job is being replaced by an assembly line CI/CD mentality. It's quite simply the transition the Industrial Revolution ushered in from skilled artisan labor to unskilled industrial labor being repeated in the tech industry.

That's not to say there aren't fundamental problems with Linux and other Unix-like OSes that made the transition necessary, but a lot of the draw for me personally as an admin person was the culture and the identity, aside from just also getting into technology via chan tech boards that got me interested in tinkering with Linux specifically. The DevOps mindset of everything being a disposable Docker container and everything being configured in YAML instead of an actual scripting language (unless you're writing small tools with Python I guess) just isn't the same as being master of all the unique, on-site servers you admin and have taken care in naming.

I've seen a few HN clones in the past posted on here, but they've never gained any traction and became defunct about a year later. What does OP mean by 'HN For'? I mean if we're talking topics, it's trivial to use the search box at the bottom to search for your topic of interest. One overlooked place for taxonomy'd topics is Pinboard: https://pinboard.in/t:sysadmin (You need an account to view the tags, but a Pinboard account is relatively cheap to obtain).

I don't work as a sysadmin, but I run a popular phpBB forum out of my own pocket (and donations), and I don't think it really fits the moniker of 'sysadmin', but I operate and maintain 2 servers (one for the live site, and a backup VPS incase the live site goes down). I regularly use the command line and have to tinker with a lot of settings to keep the board running smoothly (banning users, bots, bad faith actors etc).

My handle here on HN is not to be taken seriously. I made it for fun :)

I used to feel that same way. But after reading HN for a while I got used to ignoring the items that don't interest me. But I've always been drawn to things outside my area of expertise. Full disclosure: I'm an ex-sysadmin, current "devops" type person. Waiting for RSS to make a comeback

The federated ecosystem for link aggregators and discussion platforms is increasing and maybe starting your own community based on one of them is an idea to keep in mind.

If I can toot my own horn in this regard, I'm working on such an alternative based on Go. The example instance I have up at the moment is a general purpose one, but you can easily create a your own. You can find it at https://littr.me

If you want to take a look at the code, there's some links in my bio.

The advantages of federated services is that you can keep your community small and tightly focused (like you said, dedicated to SysOps) but at the same time your users can subscribe to other instances and participate there through the federation mechanism.

FreeBSDNews and some Slashdot topics have news for sysadmins:

https://www.freebsdnews.com/

Security Story Archive for Slashdot https://slashdot.org/archive.pl?op=topics&keyword=security

Unix Story Archive for Slashdot https://slashdot.org/archive.pl?op=topics&keyword=unix

It's good that HN is full of webdev stuff.

If it was full of high-quality sysadmin stuff then I'd spend whole days here and would not be able to get anything done

Discord:

http://aka.ms/winadmins - End user Compute management discussions(Intune/MECM/SCCM/M365/AzureAD)

https://aka.ms/ITOpsTalks-General - Azure administration and operations(More Azure Developer and operations related discussions)

Is it not Slashdot you're asking for? It has always felt to me to be dominated by sysadmins.

Alternative: Admin network and security magazine. Good admin articles.

Twenty years ago it would have been the Scary Devil Monastery. But that was another lifetime, and besides, the protocol is dead.

"Sysadmin"? Is that still a thing? I thought we'd moved onto DevOps and SRE and Platform Engineer now.

Not sysadmin but there's lobste.rs which has less general content - maybe you'll find something interesting there, unless of course you do know it already

If you just want to ask questions, serverfault would be a good start.

/r/msp /r/netsec /r/sysadmin

There’s a decent winadmins community on discord

/r/sysadmin is not bad.

Lobste.rs is a lot more diverse than just sysadmin stuff. But I find lurking on there more sysadmin-related stuff is posted than I see on the frontpage here.

For the most part, the people you're looking for aren't here, they're on Twitter or Slack. The chatops and devopschat slacks are decent. On Twitter there are tons of great people to follow. My short list is @littleidea, @purpleidea, @yesthattom, @allspaw, @botchagalupe, @damonedwards, @bejammingh, @miah_, @netik, @realgenekim, @jezhumble, @bryanl, @antonbabenko, @brikis98, @sigje, @philiph, @phredmoyer, @mipsytipsy, @lizthegrey, @KrisBuytaert, @nathenharvey, @srhtcn, @gethash, @bridgetkromhout, @patrickdebois, @hashicorp, @pulumi, @ lkanies, @adamhjk, @ripienaar, @garethr

Hope this helps a bit.