Tutorials and tools for sysadmins and developers | Hacker News Reader

Tutorials and tools for sysadmins and developers

syscoding.com

55 pointsaps-sids8 comments

I don't know how useful this would be for sysadmins. Looking at the tutorials, the first one is How To Add a User With Root Privileges on Ubuntu 14.04. A few problems I see with this:

- Why have a distro (and version) specific tutorial to accomplish something that's pretty much global?

- Adduser isnt even Ubuntu 14.04 specific. A default sudo group might be limited to ubuntu, but not 14.04, debian has wheel, but nothing by default in sudoers, sudo isn't even in a base install IIRC, but thats maybe an extra paragraph to explain.

- Using adduser, which is only installed on some (deb based?) systems instead of useradd which exists pretty much everywhere and is equally as simple to use. So instead of learning something that can be applied to any system, you learn something specific to this setup.

- What if the `sudo` group isnt in /etc/sudoers? Why not show visudo, a quick example of the syntax, maybe adding a group to sudoers.

- It'd be nice to explain what these commands actually do and show the changes in /etc/passwd and /etc/group that they make.

- A user with root privileges would have [ug]id 0, this is just adding the user to a group that has sudo privs.

Looking at the tools on the page, I can maybe see the dns propagation checker being useful (I keep my own lists to check against but I don't think that's standard practice), and maybe the geolocation, though it doesnt offer anything more than every other geolocation tool, or just hitting the maxmind db, which I assume this uses. The rest of the tools exist locally on most nix systems, and I dont see much advantage to running them off the site, unless they offered a choice of locations/networks/transit/PoPs to test from. A traceroute from some random server doesn't really tell you much without knowing the network layout, or at the very least the location, other than maybe for "down for everyone or just me" type problems.

In all I don't see much here for sysadmins, maybe for people just starting to learn how to become a sysadmin, but I wouldn't recommend it for that either, as the tutorials all seems to have the same kind of problems I mentioned above.

[0] https://syscoding.com/tutorials/7/how-to-add-a-user-with-roo...

Edit: You might wanna seriously consider rate limiting the network tools, especially the port scanner.

Looks to me like a pretty generic tutorial site - they have very specific tutorials like that because the authors don't know any better (lacking deeper knowledge of the underlying systems), and OS-specific tutorials score higher in search engines / queries.

Your additional explanation also highlights an important issue in Linux - it's not simple, and for every problem there's a dozen solutions, each with its own caveats and special cases.

The geolocation tool is pretty inaccurate as well.

I've always found the tutorials over at Digital Ocean to be an excellent resource in helping me learn sysadmin skills. Other people looking to learn these skills might find this useful:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials

I signed up with this service an have yet to receive my confirmation email. I will give it a try when it comes through.

If this is just catering to Linux sysadmins, it should be stated there in the title

If it's not, perhaps you want to try use POSIX-compatible commands / scripts, or at least be cross-platform, at least the major ones

Maybe can add Perl tutorials as well, as it's widely available (pre-installed) in most servers

Oh, its broken https://syscoding.com/network/reverse/?host=127.0.0.1

It seems like a random collection of tutorials.

Why not simply put the information on the web as blogs, and let users find you based on a google search?

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