Hacker News Reader

Comment by chatmasta | Hacker News Reader

If you’re manually SSHing into machines to manage them, surely you could include an “apt install tmux” in there.

Outside of a pure development environment, you can't just install software on a machine. You have to create a change request and have it approved. And the latter just won't happen for stuff like tmux, there's simply no business justification for it.

Same problem here with htop or atop. That sux!

My point was, it seems odd for a company to have a rule like that but also encourage manually SSHing into servers. That manual administration is already a code smell, in that it’s an I mplicit rejection of immutable infrastructure. So it’s funny that the same company would forego immutable infrastructure while disallowing any installation of packages on the server. Either go all the way or not.

It doesn't seem odd if you've worked in enterprise, just sad :)

Even at the Fortune x00 companies I've consulted for, I believe I would have been able to get that approved. Any time you are asking people to manually administer boxes, those people are going to want tooling for that job. Manual deploy takes 8+ hours and sometimes ssh sessions time out or are interrupted? We'd like to install a persistent session management tool.

I'm not sure if you're saying that myopic management won't see a business justification or that there truly is not one.

that's paradoxal. if you can automate something you lose the argument to have tmux or anything similar.

if you have to login, you wont be installing it everywhere.

and yes, we automate it. if I am logging in, it is for post mortems.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com