Ask a sysadmin/blue team anything

Ask a sysadmin/blue team anything

Stupidest mistake you've made on a production server.

Oh boy, where do I begin? Back when I was a newb, I had a command in the home directory named "fuckit.sh" which was just sudo rm -rf / --no-preserve-root. I had another shell file named fixpackage.sh which just verified the integrity of a couple .deb files. Instead of running fixpackage.sh, I ran fuckit.sh. That was a fun day.

I always type like 2 letters and then tab the rest.

I dont even fuckin remember why I had that file. I had a few offline backups of the server, and we had sensitive shit on them, so my mentality was "Eh, if all else fails, we revert back to the data from yesterday". Forgot to actually take a backup the day before, so we were behind 2 days.

how many servers/endpoints you managing?

Why the fuck did you keep a script with execution permission (though "script" might be a strong word here) that does literally nothing but destroy the root directory and everything in it? Why?

You're a sick man, OP.

Sensitive data. Red team likes to play a little dirty, so I keep the safety off just in case. At least I did. I now have to chmod it whenever I need to run it.

Can't say for sure, I actually never bothered to check. I have several Proxmox servers, each with a few VMs

One of the proxmox clusters. Someone asked me to host a discord bot. This thing fuckin eats up memory.

How easy is your job really?

TBH, its really good. I only spend about an hour actually doing anything relevant to the servers. Everything else is either automated or done by the end user via SSH. I'm only there to fix bricked, hacked, or crappy machines, and set up basic packages for users who are new to Debian/Ubuntu

Also, here's the nadeko shit. This thing is really damn resource hungry. It used 102% of the CPU earlier. I'm not sure where the 2% came from, will keep you posted.

I want to be paid to run
# apt install openssh-server
:^(

not as easy as that

apt-install openssh-server
wget (dropbox link to a zip file of shell files for new users)
commands like apt-get update/upgrade, telinit 6 to restart, ect.

That's still incredibly easy.

Well keep in mind most people don't know the first thing about linux servers, and I usually get spam called by some 10 year old who wants me to set up his minecraft server. No joke, this has happened at least 3 times.

That's great. You need to record one of those calls sometime.

dude has like sub-20 vms and seems to mostly talk about file and network permissions? the only way that can be a full time job is if they're each running unique in-house apps that require a lot of fine tuning

if its in any way standardised vms, that's maybe 20 minutes a day.

>usually get spam called by some 10 year old who wants me to set up his minecraft server
>Someone asked me to host a discord bot

>Sensitive data
sounds pretty sensitive to me

>proxmox in production
>open source shit, not something with a support contract

Smells like small business shop. How's your linksys firewall doing, OP?

Explain to a 50yo user what your trying to say in old fashioned english

No need to be brief or carry on just the same

My new laptop won't run games that it has more than recommended specs for above 10 fps. I've updated all the drivers from their respective websites, removed all the bloatware, made all the settings changes that I could find suggested on the web, still no change.

Why is there no god to save me from this?

he runs a couple of servers and gets in trouble if somebody else hacks them, even if it's somebody else in the org just pretending to hack

How did you get into the security field?
I have a degree, security+, and red and blue team experience from college but I couldn't even get an entry level security position and had to take an unrelated engineering job instead.

Bump. Plz answer.

Not him, but I'll answer

>Start poking around shit, looking for security vulns.
>Report to your boss.
>switched to security

why do you consider yourself blue team and not just sysadmin?

Its a really big company. Non IT personel poking around is generally frowned upon. I tried applying to IT but found out I have to work my current job for a year before applying for a different one.