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Comment by spudlyo | Hacker News Reader

Let me get this straight. You intentionally built out a custom DYI enthusiast IT infrastructure out of a random collection of OpenBSD and Linux boxen and then complain that nobody but you understands it? Unless you've completely documented how everything works and fits together you've made it very difficult for anyone else to maintain it. That's one way to ensure job security.

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What are you talking about here?

The mailserver is Postfix, the file server is samba, the FTP daemon is VsFTPd, imap is courier imap.

Are you a microsoft rep or something? None of this stuff is even remotely "enthusiast".

The Contact manager is just a web-frontend that I made for that sits on top of (and supplements) an existing system (as/400 green screens that they hate).

I'm sorry, but this is kindof insulting. What do you mean "enthusiast DIY"?

My apologies for offending. DIY is "do it yourself". An enthusiast (like myself) would prefer to use OpenVPN or FreeSWAN instead of a Cisco ASA, would rather use iptables on a Linux box than a commodity firewall, would rather slap a wireless card into an OpenBSD machine rather than to buy a commodity access point, etc. This is cool and all, but it makes it harder for other folks to deal with. Let's say your on vacation and there is a problem with the wireless. If you had used a commodity access point, somebody could have just reset it, as opposed to have to log into the OpenBSD box and unload/load the kernel driver, or frobbed it with ifconfig, or whatever.

Small companies and large companies have entirely different time/money tradeoffs and it can be hard to make the transition. At my previous employer it was fine to spend a week making something work by cobbling together existing projects with some glue code. It was fun and I learned a lot.

So when I started this job (working with large companies) helping out with a co-worker's task I started trying to solve a particular problem the skinflint way, ok we can repurpose this box here to serve a filesystem while the other box is down for the vendor to swap the firmware and then...

My co worker (rightly) pre-empted me and recommended $20,000 of SAN equipment to replace the problematic device.

Neither way is better in the absolute, it's a question of what variable you're optimizing for.

If you read more closely, you would see that this isn't a WTF, but more of a beautiful complex system that actually makes sense. blhack only used one OpenBSD box for the normal network and used the second one to patch the network together after one of the T1s went down. Sure, it's DYI, but it is simple and makes sense.

Whatever he used his boss still wouldn't have understood it. The problem he's having is balancing programming time, with IT time. Something I do very poorly myself, but it's not hopeless.

The funny thing is I've been interrupted 3 times while writing this comment, it's ruined my flow and I forget what I was going to write.

Oh yea, I lock myself in an office and close the door when it's time to work on spurts of programming, otherwise I feel burnt out and nothing gets done. I've also got a boss who's capable of doing IT work. Having two of us helps entirely, maybe a $25k a year intern to ease the "my caps lock is broken!" off your plate could help.

But seriously, take your 20% time and don't answer the phone and use it to program. You need your focus time, and then come back and do the rest of your job.

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