Show HN: Sysadmin Casts – simple bite-sized sysadmin screencasts | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Sysadmin Casts – simple bite-sized sysadmin screencasts

sysadmincasts.com

Here's a site I've been working on for over a year now. Actually posted to HN asking for feedback on the idea [1]. So far, it's been a slow road, no over night success or anything, slowly building the site and releasing new episodes as I have time.

Personally, it has been a major growing experience, and showed me the power of the internet. People from all over the world are emailing me out of the blue (and it's not spam!). Almost jaw dropping to think about it. If you have an idea, work on it, release it, refine it, and see where it goes. I had always just sat on my ideas.

Happy to answer any questions, comments, or concerns.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5828603

That is excellent material, not only for sysadmins, but for anyone interested in diving in the UNIX world. Great work !

I see you have direct download for videos, really good.

It looks like the video controls are not shown by default, and I don't think it's my browser because other non-flash videos have them; is it on your side ?

Interesting, I can see the controls (ubuntu firefox/chrome), but I have had reports that adblock/flashblock is doing something. I'll need to investigate this further. Thanks for reporting it though!

Great work, the content looks solid and I love that you've already covered several frequently omitted, but very useful features (transcripts, mobile usable video downloads, notifications, rss).

My only request would be to come up with a way to provide content more regularly. It looks things are pretty sporadic as is. Personally, I wouldn't mind a weekly digest type email that contains perhaps a blurb on an great book, a short list of select links and a preview of an upcoming cast.

Keep it up.

Thanks for the feedback. Yeah, I totally want to put more episodes out, just a juggling act right now. Hopefully, I can figure out some way to work on them full time.

Easy, charge $$ for them. This is great stuff, and people value it highly. You will have more time to work on them if there's income coming from them, and your customers will benefit from you covering more topics, more quickly. Everybody wins!

Three ideas:

- Make them all access free for the first week they're up, then charge for access to the back catalog. See CreativeLive[1] for a good example. This way everyone can measure the quality of video, audio, transcripts, etc so they know what they're getting, and the people who need to learn a specific topic will have a strong incentive to pay. This will encourage you to cover evergreen topics to make your back catalog more valuable

- Flip it and make the new videos available to subscribers for the 1st N months, then free afterwards. This will bias you towards covering the newest, churniest stuff that is causing people pain right now

- Do like RailsCasts and alternate between free and paid videos. Paid subscribers get twice as many videos, everybody still gets something free for marketing etc

Personally I think the first one is your best bet.

[1] https://www.creativelive.com/

Thanks very much for your feedback! You have several very good points that I will explore, specifically the various models that might work. Ideally, I'd like to keep the site free and maybe have a couple key sponsors or something, still exploring the idea.

Please charge money for this.

Paying 5 bucks per CC means nothing to you or me, but it would exclude a world of people from a learning resource, which is always sad.

You can make it optional or "Pay what you can" or "Pay it to the world" (somebody you see on the street)

You don't have to come up with a business model for your site at all, it's your baby, but a click-to-donate button wouldn't hurt :-)

Or use advertising and not charge anything and make money from businesses trying to target DevOps and SysAdmins which probably is pretty lucrative from a publisher standpoint.

I'm kind of wondering how sustainable a pay for screencasts business is. A couple people seem to have burned out on it (railscasts, Gary Bernhardt). I'm not sure if its the expectation of getting something new up every week or two weeks is too stressful or they just run out of material. Is it possible to keep it going without getting sick of it or running out of things to talk about?

There is probably some merit in the season model that American television takes. "I'm going to release 12/18/24/whatever episodes over the next six/eight/twelve months" is probably more sustainable than a weekly screencast pledge. Gives the author some time off to recharge, and (perhaps more importantly) some time for technology to evolve.

Since I have a background as a poker player one of the coaching sites (deucescracked) followed a season model whereas the others (cardrunners, leggopoker and later bluefire) were more similar to "release videos on a somewhat set schedule but not too strict"

It might actually be worthwhile comparing those sites to subscription based techcasts since both are in the business of selling expert knowledge.

One major difference I see is that the selling point of poker sites is that the players are successful so there might be value in a screencast site that focuses more on "rockstar developers" etc.

There exist many successful screencasts businesses. I think the main problem with "subscribe monthly for unlimited access and new screencasts every month" is the "new screencasts every month" bit. That is an issue with the business/charging model, not with publishing screencasts for money.

There's no reason why somebody with a back catalog of 200 episodes who doesn't have desire/bandwidth to record more can't sell access to the back catalog and fairly easily get to $X00,000 per year.

> Make them all access free for the first week they're up, then charge for access to the back catalog.

So, encourage someone to download each new video and distribute it via torrent once the paywall goes up. Cool.

Have a look at the laracasts site, they have a good mix of free/paid content and the price is very reasonable.

Thanks -- I'll check it out!

Instead of straight up charging, a Patreon account might be a good idea. Its sort of a middle road between donations and paying for content: http://www.patreon.com/

Really nice and easy to follow, I love the clear audio and well cropped screencasts. The transcripts and documentation is just the cherry on top.

Might I ask what you are using for the screen recording and editing workflow? I'm doing some end-user training videos and having mixed results.

First, I get the idea. Either through suggestion or something I'm working on. Then the workflow looks like a storyboard with some research. For the videos, I'm using ubuntu as my desktop, then use kazam for desktop recording [1], then Audacity [2] for voice recording, and finally kdenlive [3] to edit the audio/video together. Along with gimp for all the graphics.

[1] https://launchpad.net/kazam

[2] http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

[3] http://www.kdenlive.org/

Very nice, as a casual sysadmin I find it very interesting.

Videos are cool and very well edited. Good job !

Comment: There are thousands of guides, HOWTOs, forums, mailing lists, etc out there to teach you how to set up basic tools in Linux. To me this doesn't constitute being a sysadmin and is only a small part of the job.

It would be really neat if you interviewed a bunch of sysadmins with long resumes, maybe people who give talks at LISA, NANOG, etc. People from different industries probably have vastly different work environments. Ask them if they have any noteworthy experiences, lessons learned, or tips that work towards developing the career versus just Linux-literacy. There's a lot of knowledge out there that isn't written down anywhere.

Very interesting idea! Thanks, I'll explore this.

I'll counter with the fact that I think consistent, accurate, and up-to-date "basic usage" information is still really hard to come by for a linux newbie. The thousands of guides, HOWTOs, forums, mailing lists, etc just means that in addition to trying to learn the system, they also have to learn how to separate the wheat from the chaff, information-wise.

I've known plenty of people who are very good programmers or Windows admin-types who would make very good linux sysadmins, but for the huge hurdle of not learning linux, but learning how to learn linux.

That's not to discount your suggestion around expert tips/war stories/etc., though.

Good job! Watched a couple of your videos, well done; I like the style and the fact you offer files for download as well as text descriptions.

Thanks ;)

Would just say Thanks for such simple casts which explain concepts from scratch and using visual illustrations and not just voiceover and commands. A boon for someone trying to master CLI.

I wonder if you could post on your "about" page more about yourself (or detail it here). In particular what your expertise is and how much experience you have in what you are writing and doing screencasts about.

Will do. Briefly, been a sysadmin for 11+ years and worked my way up the ladder. Have various certifications but honestly most/all of this can be learned on-line nowadays. Working at a mega corp looking after High Performance Compute (HPC) infrastructure. Think labs across the country + scientists needing HPC to do their research.

You definitely need to put that on your "about" page.

There's something about this site that's very www-of-1996 for me, in the best way possible.

That is, here's a site full of useful information, obviously created by someone who is interested in the subject and cares about it. And not a single "Subscribe for $X a month now!" button to be found. No "call to action" to bleet/myface/instasnap all my friends a link. No "enter your contact info to be funneled into my sales lead generator service that's the actual reason for this site to exist" text box.

It's freaking refreshing. This reminds me of back in the day when most webpages were basically "Here's something I care about and think is cool. Here's what I have to share regarding it. No, I don't expect anything in return, other than maybe a friendly email or two." These types of sites still exist, but they seem to be a distinct minority.

> These types of sites still exist, but they seem to be a distinct minority.

And even though they are often excellent they're usually really hard to find in search engines.

Thanks for the kind words. Originally, I didn't even want to host a mailing list (via "get notified" link in the header), but tptacek convinced me it was a good idea [1], and he was right, it opened an invaluable communication channel with my viewers. In the future, I might follow the 90s shareware model, use till you find it useful, then donate. But we'll see how it plays out. Just felt strange asking for money when I didn't think I had enough content/wasn't good enough yet.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5828686

Oh, that's really neat! Just a small idea, if you don't mind: perhaps you could have a list (either curated or crowd sourced) of eventual topics to be covered in future screencasts so people can upvote or downvote them according to their preference? This way you'd know your audience and they'd tell you in advance how to drive the production of the screencasts. Anyway, I've shared it with friends already and have also subscribed for the next screencasts. Good job, Justin!

Wow, this is a great idea. Thanks, I'll put something together so everyone is on the same page!

A suggestion to help you avoid building something out right now. Use a public Trello board. Add each idea as a card and have one card specific for people to comment on. The cards you add can go into a list called "potential stuff" and people can vote on them.

(This is kind of how to the Trello team works as well. They have a public dev board for people to see what's coming up and what's just been released.)

Good luck with the project. Thank you so much for this. It's extremely useful

Funny you mention Trello, because that is what I'm using right now for all my ideas ;) I have lots of lists with cards for the different idea types. It's actually really nice because behind each card you can have notes, checklists, etc. So, as I'm researching the ideas I'm updating the cards.

I've had a Trello card system up as well. I kept my ideas dumped into it publicly in hopes that that would raise my accountability and get me off my procrastinating ass to get work done. My procrastinating ass turned out to be much stronger than I expected sadly. Even so, the system is gold and I use it in organizing pretty much everything I need to do.

(I also pledge, that the day I start earning money from my side projects, if I ever release that is, I'll buy into their paid plan).

One of my favorite blogs does this: http://undocumentedmatlab.com/todo

Really happy to see this project get more attention (I just heard about it today). The screencasts alone are well-produced enough to make it worth bookmarking, but the impressive part is the well-formatted transcripts...it's already a pain to edit video well, nevermind try to match it up with text and code. I'd demand that this be considered best and required practice, but that's a lot of work to ask from independent screencasters, but when it's done, it makes the content so much more accessible and consumable.

Also what's neat, at least to a novice like me, is the kind of basics that get covered...sysadmin involves so many different systems and technologies it's difficult to know where the hell to start from, short of shadowing someone at their day job. There's a great foundation here...and thanks to the near-timelessness of *.nix, it's one that will be valuable and relevant, hopefully, for the next few decades. Kudos to the OP.

The transcripts are probably the since most commented on feature. It is a lot of work, but having something that you can copy/paste if you are trying to do this yourself, is something worth putting the effort into. I sometimes even find myself coming back to an episode and looking at the commands ;)

Just wanted to say, thanks for the kind words!

Ok, I just had to come here after watching Episode 24 end to end. I had always wanted to learn about the concept of containers and your episode has illuminated me. Next will be Episode 14.

One comment: I only came here to see how to compensate you for my learning. Look, you spent a lot of time on this. You are trying to be nice and everything, but I think if I gave you a $20 then you would save on a meal, which anybody can appreciate. I know you are going to say "No, no need" whatever. Which is ok. But remember that you need to see some good impact on your bottom line so that you can keep this going.

That's all. Send us a paypal link or whatever.

Thank you for teaching me something today that I really wanted to learn. And in 20 minutes!

Thanks for the kind words ;)

Great resource. Free. What can I say more.

I think one of issue of SysAdmin is that when you read a tutorial and type the command the result, the output is just different and you have no way to validate that the method/command/param is right.

Now with the video, all are there. I know it worked for s.o. If if isn't on my machine, it's my own problem.

I think you should contact http://serversforhackers.com/ to get some advertisement for increasing traffic. It has no way this kind of resource get into the dust.

Hope many people upvote to let this great resource spread out itself.

"Shut up and take my money!"

PLEASE CHARGE MONEY for this, as great as the stuff you have up looks already I can't help think how much more time and energy you could devote to this if your were charging a small subscription service. I'm thinking similar to RailsCasts at $9/month

As a web developer who is trying to do more and more sysadmin stuff I can say that this kind of resource is just what I need. Syadmin seems to be trailing way behind development in terms of resources for people looking to get started.

Subscribed. Could you do one on using MAC such as SELinux or ideally GRSecurity?

Too many people end up disabling them and putting their box at a much higher risk of compromise.

Yes, absolutely on both SELinux/GRSecurity fronts. I 100% agree that they get disabled because no one knows what they hell they are doing and just need them to get out of the way. If there was some simple tutorials then this would probably go a looong way. I've added them to the list.

Looks really good. GJ :)

One feature suggestion: User comments on casts. Could be done with up/down voting. This gives the users a possibility to help each other clear up things they were unclear on after watching a video. Look at Kahn Academy for an example of what I'm thinking.

Excellent. Just excellent. Now that many web developers use heroku right out of the gate, they've never had to really dive too deeply into unix (newbies, that is).

Throw a stripe checkout for $10 / month on there and you've got an excellent business.

And keep in mind that many of us will very happily pay for this. I think it's admirable to want to do this for free, but it's unsustainable. You deserve to be paid for your time. And it will only create a feedback loop of higher quality content that more people want, which you can gauge by whether people are paying.

I know someone who does very well off a how-to website, no payments but advertising and evergreen content. Especially since customers are Linuxy, he might not want to put a paywall up unless he's very sure. Alternatively, create videos for tools that only real companies would use and charge for those. E.g. Puppet, Chef etc.

Maybe put some of the commands / tools used near the top (e.g. RHS) and/or tag the videos with them somewhere. You could then have one or many aggregation pages highlighting ways to use certain commands or tools.

Thanks for the feedback! This might help find related episodes more easily. For example, that puppet and vagrant might go together, etc. Maybe even a master list of commands and then links out to the episodes or something. I'll ponder this and put something together.

It would be great if you had a Twitter account to notify of new screencasts too!

In the works (also, thanks for the feedback)!

While I like the idea, the content seems to be aimed at a very junior audience, almost really for desktop support techs that are thinking of career progression. It would be great to see some more advanced material on topics such as kernel / network tuning, PostgreSQL clustering, btrfs workflows and automation, service discovery (serf, consul, etcd), ruby for Sysadmins, backup automation etc etc etc

Yeah, I hear you. HN users caio1982, actually had an awesome idea, it was to create a page on the site where users could up/down vote and submit episode idea [1]. This might be a good way to get the pulse of what people want.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8011626

The sysadmin stackoverflow might be a good source of ideas for episodes too.

read sysadmin cats, got very excited until I clicked on link...

Edit: great source nonetheless

I did the same thing!

Why did you decide to use a custom video player and not an established service like YouTube or Vimeo? I think a lot of people forget how much time these services spend optimising their video players and delivery. Plus, these services are another avenue of content discovery.

Can't see any reasons against using one of these services.

It's not custom, it looks to be a 3rd party service [1].

[1] http://sysadmincasts.com

It's sublimevideo [0] loading files from Cloudfront. Nothing bad about it.

Yes, the videos could be easily found in Youtube or Vimeo, but that's not a good choice if he is building a potential revenue stream.

What he could do is just upload to Youtube some free chapters (for easy discovery), and then have some premium and charge for them. Like RailCasts.

[0] http://www.sublimevideo.net/

The only reason to use Youtube at this point is to get eyeballs. I can see 2 problems with YT.

1. Their contentID system makes you have to prove you are not a thief.

2. Shifting revenue stream distribution are only ever good for Youtube first and publishers second. They are a big organization now. Some would say a monopoly. If they can't get 10% revenue growth from their users they'll carve it from under their publishers.

I think YT and Vimeo are really good but even I enjoy having a healthy market where all types of players exist.

You should probably call it devops, since everyone who has ever written part of a shell script is a devop.

..maybe since we started using that buzzword 5 or so years ago, but sysadmins have written shell scripts since the birth of *NIX operating systems...

I initially read the title as 'Sysadmin Cats'... which could be funny if it got the Oatmeal treatment. That said, I'm interested in watching some screencasts when I get a chance. It looks like you already have a decent and growing library. Nice work!

Continuous play would be nice! Watching all 27 episodes in one sitting to get up to speed.

This looks great, and super useful! My only suggestion would be to enhance the player to allow me to playback at 1.5x and 2x speed. The HTML5 player on youtube has this and once you start using it, you want it everywhere.

Nicely done, good work. I just tweeted about this, you deserve traffic and kudos.

Hey, thanks! I'll check out that issue with adblockplus too.

Great content.

How are you handling hosting for your videos and are the costs manageable?

I am using AWS S3/CloudFront (should probably do an episode on it ;). Just to give you an idea of how awesome it is. There were 200+ people on the site when this hit the front page [1]. The site is still really fast and the bill will likely be less than $5.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/MR4hctd.png

Neat videos! Have you considered adding media enclosures to your RSS feed so it is a podcast? I usually watch videos like these on the go.

Yes, someone actually emailed me with a script to make this happen (even included a diff of my current rss feed to the new one -- blown away). I will be adding this shortly!

Your video player does not show controls (http://cdn.sublimevideo.net/js/03un6j5a.js as linked in the HTML redirects to http://sublimevideo.net, not JS)

What OS/browser are you using? Here's a screenshot of the controls on my box ubuntu/firefox @ http://i.imgur.com/cI19BOl.png

Do you have adblock/noscript/flashblock running?

looks great

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