However, installing from source with make was (and remains) a mess. It may work if you're dedicated to maintaining one application and (part of) its stack. But even then it usually leads to out of date software and tracking versions by hand.

Many people have this weird aversion to doing basic sysadmin stuff with Linux. What makes it weird is that it's really simple. Often easier than figuring out another deploy system.

(The neckbeard in me blames the popularity of OSX on dev machines.)

[1] https://nodesource.com/blog/nodejs-v012-iojs-and-the-nodesou...

I think a lot of this is a result of what I like to call the "Kumbaya approach to project/team management":

This is where you have a team (either for a single project or a team at a consulting agency, etc) that is effectively all development-focused staff, possibly with some who dabble in Infrastructure/Ops. In this environment, when a decision about something like "how do we get a reliable build of X for our production server deployment system" needs to be made or a system needs to be supported, no idea is "bad", because no one has the experience or confidence to be able to say "that's a stupid idea, we are not making `curl http://bit.ly/foo | sudo bash` the first line of a deployment script"[1]

[1] yes this is an exaggeration, but there are some simply shocking things happening in real environments, that are not far off that mark.

Edit: to make it absolutely clear about what I was referring to with [1]:

The specific point I was making was running something they don't even see (how many people would actually look at the script before piping it to bash/sh ?) from a non-encrypted source, and relying on a redirection service that could remove/change your short url at any time.

Unfortunately I was stupid enough to ddg it (duckduckgo it, as opposed to google it) and apparently this exact use-case was previously the recommended way of installing RVM[2]

[2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5421800/rvm-system-wide-i...

-

Like, most of the way deployment should work is that you come up with some collection of packages that need to be installed and you iterate through and install them. Bob's your uncle.

Thing is, all the packages you need live out in the wild internet. Ideally, you'd just be able to take a package, vet it, and put it in your local artifact store and then when your production deployment system (using apt or yum or pip or gems or maven or whatever) needs a package, it looks at your local artifact store and grabs it and goes about its business. Never knowing or touching the outside world.

And your developers would all write their apps to deploy through the normal packaging methods that everyone and their mother is already familiar with and they could just put them into the existing package index as well.

But you've gotta lay out pretty serious moola (from when I last looked into available solutions to this) or set up a half dozen different artifact stores if you want to do things that way. And good luck managing your cached and private artifacts if you do. And on top of that developers don't necessarily know how to set up a PyPi or a RPM index or whatever so that the storage is reliable and you've got the right security settings or whatever else. (I know I sure don't and I'm not really interested in reading all of the ones I'd end up needing).

Setting up RPM is shockingly easy. It can get more complex, but the basic system is:

  REPOBASE=/srv/www/htdocs/
  createrepo -v  $REPOBASE
  gpg -a --detach-sign --default-key "Sign Repo" $REPOBASE/repodata/repomd.xml
  gpg -a --export "Sign Repo" > $REPOBASE/repodata/repomd.xml.key

Then you get to decide on the deployment machine if you want to trust the repo (or you don't trust any and import the key via some other process, aka direct gpg import).

Of course you can find a bunch of more detailed explanations with $SEARCHENGINE, but if it takes more than a day to figure it out, your doing something wrong.

Building a set of RPM's isn't that much harder if you have a proper build system. But these are the kinds of things you give up when you decide to grab the latest immature hotness created by someone on their day off.

Not only "previously", it's the current recommended way to install rvm. From their front page:

>> curl -sSL https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable

[1] http://rvm.io/

[1] http://get.docker.io/

https://rvm.io/rvm/security

The whole security, whether GPG is invoked or not, relies on the security of the HTTPS connection alone.

If the HTTPS cannot be trusted alone, then everything is lost as a compromised HTTPS connection can be used supply both a comprimised GPG key and a compromised package, or, indeed, anything at all that is legal to `| sudo bash`...

And HTTPS security boils down to:

1. The difficulty of altering (or exploiting privileged position wrt) the global routing table to setup MitM or MitS scenarios.

2. The difficulty of obtaining a valid looking certificate for an arbitrary domain.

Any situation where a government actor is the adversary poses intractable challenges to both 1 and 2 above. (And before you say NSA/GCHQ would never care about XYZ, consider China...

So even if you trust https works, it's still a tricky proposition - it's not really similar to a distro's package distribution channel.

[1]: https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/docs/INST...

Are you really trying to say that the instructions for installing Docker should be considered in-scope for a guide to install Discourse on a cloud server?

They've included a short snippet that will get you a Docker, in the way recommended by Docker, for whatever your base system is. Many production systems do not move at the pace of Docker development, so it's not practical to run Docker from your distribution's package archive. Some distros will not have distributed packaged Docker releases at all.

What's wrong with these instructions? If you are really "dealing with this" right now, it is worth noting that something like 20 or more supported platforms have specific Docker installation instructions from the Docker website.

https://docs.docker.com/installation/#installation

From a quick sample of those instructions, only the Ubuntu instruction page uses the wget|sh method, and it's using an SSL connection to Docker's own website to add an apt source with signatures in the supported way. This way should work on any Debian-based or Yum-based distro, and writing the instructions like this must likely save Discourse from getting a lot of "How do I docker" issues and e-mails from their clueless users.

So, would you prefer that part just says "installing Docker is out of scope" or should the Discourse developers go through every distro and cloud system and document the specific instructions for that? To do that would completely defeat the purpose of even using Docker at all.

Quick directions like these aren't questioned by users who just want to get things done, and they invite security risks just as the parent & article suggest.

I understand that curl pipe sh could have security problems but I also don't see it as that much different than the "normal" and "ok" way of doing things. I would consider something like the below pretty normal.

  wget https://whatever.io/latest.tgz
  tar xzf latest.tgz
  cd whatever-stable
  ./configure && make
  sudo make install

What is so different about

  curl https://whatever.io/installer.sh | sudo bash

I agree that curl sh | sudo bash makes my spidey sense tingle. But if I really cared, I would read the source and do all the normal stuff anyway. So I think it's some kind of weird familiarity phase we're all in.

With a good build system (eg. autotools) writing an RPM spec takes almost no time at all and if you have the proper infrastructure in place for building packages, you can have something workable in a very short time.

Self-packaged RPMs also don't need to be quite as high-quality as ones you might want to include in a distribution, so if it makes sense for your use case, it's perfectly okay have "bloat" (eg. an entire python virtualenv) in your package.

Yikes. Have we sunk this far?

A distro (or official vendor, or possibly a trusted third-party) repo of pre-built, signed packages would always be my first choice.

If one of those isn't available, my next step would be to create a package for the tool in question, part of which is setting up a file for `uscan` to download new source archives, and compare against the signatures.

In this scenario we (as in the organisation) are now responsible for actually building and maintaining the package, but we can still be assured that it's built from the original sources, we can still install it on production (and even dev, staging, whatever) servers with a simple call to apt/aptitude, and dependencies, removal, upgrades, etc are still handled cleanly.

I find it interesting that binary packages have existed for decades and yet `rpm etc` knowledge is rare. Why did curl sh become popular? Why doesn't every project have rpm|deb download links for every distro version? Why don't github projects have binary auto-builds hosted by github? I'd argue that it's too difficult. Binary packaging didn't succeed universally. For deployment, containers are (in the end) easier.

But the original article is conflating container concepts and user behavior (not wrongly). If docker hub does end up hosting malware-laden images, it would be interesting emergent behavior but it would be orthogonal to containers. Like toolbars. Toolbars probably aren't evil. A vector for evil maybe?

What makes you think the knowledge is rare? Among developers who actively target linux distributions I would imagine the opposite is true.

Even a number of the referenced curl|bash offenders are just using that as a "shortcut" to add their own apt/yum repos and calling apt-get/yum to install their binary package(s).

* Using checkinstall to create a local deb/rpm which can be easily installed/removed later instead of "make install". * What if installer.sh says "rm -rf /tmp/PACKAGE-build" and the connection is interrupted just after the first "/", you now have "rm -rf /". Oops. * configure will tell you what files it needs, and apt-file will tell you want dependencies to install. * I know what make install does. I know make. Who wrote installer.sh? Do they know anything about writing good software? Steam wiped out home directories, who knows what these people do

    # remove the old version of our data
    sudo rm -rf /usr/local/share/some_data_folder

Or, you know, maybe someone updated the whatever.io installer to make it 'better'. But you are trying to debug some problem and you made one image last month and another one this month and you're pulling your hair out trying to figure out why they are different. Oh, it's because some text changed on some web site somewhere.

You've taken a mandatory step and put it outside your sphere of control.

No, it's not :(

It's really really bad, but people will continue doing it until commands/things become so easy we can actually understand what we're doing. Unfortunately, this has never been a priority in Unix-land as far as I've gathered.

But it isn't all that hard to understand a clean Unix. I have never copied or typed a command that I don't understand.

One problem may be that most Unices these days is not as clean anymore as, say OpenBSD or NetBSD. E.g. the recent X stack, with D-BUS, various *Kits, etc. is quite opaque. This madness was primarily contained to the desktop and proprietary Unices, but seems to spread through server Linuxes these days as well (and no, this is not an anti-systemd rant).

Well, good for you. I can assure you that it's not the case for almost anyone who approached Linux after the likes of Mandrake were released and/or tried to make it work on anything different from a traditional server.

I'm all for trying to understand what one is doing (and I wholeheartedly agree with TFA's point), but the reality is that very few people in the world really understand all intricacies of one's operating system. This does not excuse poor security practices, but it explains their background.

You wouldn't hire some high school kid who's just about taught themselves HTML by reading a book for a week, and get them to write your web application from ground up. You'd hire someone who knows what they're doing. Why is it seen as any different for Operations work? There is a reason systems administration is a skilled field, and a reason they're paid on a par with developers.

However yes the issue of a team that "doesn't make money" is very real. Maybe you it should be "marketed" like legal or accounting: it doesn't make money, it saves money caused by SNAFUBAR situations.

1. I saw it done that way in some blog.

2. We did it like that at my last job.

3. Seems like it works.

/(apt-get|yum|dnf) install (apache2|httpd|nginx|lighttpd)/

One of the problems (as I tried to argue) is that most Unices have become far more complex. The question is if the extra complexity is warranted on a server system, especially if bare Unix (OpenBSD serves as a good example here) was not that hard to understand.

Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean that we should look back. Another possibility would be to deploy services as unikernels (see Mirage OS) that use a small, thin, well-understood library layer on top of e.g. Xen, so that there isn't really an exploitable operating system underneath.

This because they want to retain their ability to shop for off the shelf hardware, while getting away from a platform that has proves less than functional for mission critical operations (never mind being locked to a single vendor).

What seems to be happening is that there is a growing disdain for power users and "admins". The only two classes that seems to count are developers and users, and the latter needs to be protected from themselves for their own good (and developer sanity).

To note that it's trivial to change what goes into the clipboard too. Copying and pasting commands from potentially untrustworthy sites should be ruled out too, even if understood

    x = eXtract files from an archive
    f = File path to the archive
    c = Create a new archive from files
    v = print Verbose output
    z = apply gZip the input or output

    j = apply bzip2 to the input or output
        (I admit, j is a weird one here, though that has made it stick in my memory)
    --list = does what's on the tin
    --exclude = does what's on the tin
    --strip-components = shortcut for dropping a leading directory from the extracted

Part of the problem is that each command line utility has its own flag language, and equivalent functions often have different letters. For instance, very often one command has "recursive" as "-r" while another has it as "-R". It's impossible to remember it all unless you're a sysadmin.

Except with cp , -R is the safe one and -r is the dangerous one. And there are tons of little inconsistencies like this.

As a former sys admin, I did that all the time. Who the hell can remember how to convert an SSL certificate to load it into a Glassfish app server? Didn't mean I couldn't step through all commands and figure out why it did that before I loaded the new cert... And next time, I just need to go to my quick hack repo for the magic incantation.

On a Unix based system, tar is just used so frequently and for so many purposes, that not understanding it feels a bit like working in a shop and not knowing how to use a roll of tape.

(I'm a developer.)

Sequences of commands sometimes get pasted into a conveniently-located text file; if I find myself repeating the operation I might turn it into a script, a shell function for my .zshrc, or an alias.

Just 10 minutes ago: mysqldump [args] | nc -v w.x.y.z 1234 nc -v -l 1234 | pv | mysql [args] (after an initial test that showed adding "gzip -1" was slower than uncompressed gigabit ethernet.)

    tar xf ./foo #automagically works with bz2 and gz files
    tar cf /tmp/out.tar . #add z for compression

    tar cf <mydir.tar> <mydir>

tar c . | gzip > /tmp/out.tar.gz

    tar -xvvzf foo.tar.gz
    tar -xvvjf bar.tar.bz2
    tar -xvvf  baz.tar

"regexsearch" is more work to type and more space taken up everytime 'grep' appears in a command-line. And says nothing about recursion.

Edit: the rest of my comment (somehow submitted to soon!)

    man grep

    /recurs<enter>

    $ man grep | grep recursive
                  directory,  recursively,  following  symbolic links only if they
                  Exclude  directories  matching  the  pattern  DIR from recursive
           -r, --recursive
                  Read all files  under  each  directory,  recursively,  following
           -R, --dereference-recursive
                  Read all files under each directory,  recursively.   Follow  all

1. I routinely need to look things up that are a bit murky in the deep recesses of my memory.

2. I am reminded continually of how nice it is to have man pages that are well written, are easily searchable, reference appropriate other pages, and are helpful enough to remind you of big picture considerations that you didn't realize you were facing when looking for a commandline flag.

Google query: git display file at revision. Immediate answer (without even having to click any links, it's in the result description): `git show revision:file`

Total time: 5 seconds

Trying to reproduce with man and help:

  man git

start scrolling down

notice git-show (show various types of objects); sounds like a likely candidate

  git show <revision> <file>

  git show -h

  usage: git log [<options>] [<since>..<until>] [[--] <path>...]
     or: git show [options] <object>...

  man git show
  man git-show

  man git-rev-parse

Give up. Google it.

When I google something, I usually do not remember the answer to my question, the only thing I remember is the keyword to put in my futur query to get the same answer. You will get your answer quicker, but you wont learn much. So personally, I prefer reading man pages (when I can) than use google.

Rsync for example, where trailing slashes make a difference and it's not obvious from skipping over the manual.

Looking at working code/commands often works better than piecing it together from the manual imo.

(I can imagine some sort of hackery that determines if less or something is running and scrolls that, but it sounds like a huge mess. Is that actually what you're doing? Does it send keypresses? What if you're in a mode where those keypresses do something besides scrolling?)

I'll be honest - I have ~no idea~ (edit: apparently there are xterm control sequences for mouse scrolling) how it's actually implemented, but several tools have some reference to mouse support (tmux, vim, etc) in option/config files, so it's probably available for your distro/platform and just needs to be enabled.

Further edit: (or PS. or whatever):

`less` pager supports mouse scrolling. `more` pager does not!

When you read the script in a browser, than pastes it in a terminal, you know that "scp -r ~/.ssh u@somehost.com" isn' there.

http://thejh.net/misc/website-terminal-copy-paste

For example, it won't protect against stealing the .ssh folder and installing a keylogger at your computer.

I don't think the problem is as rampant as it's made out to be in TFA... that said, most people don't look at said script(s), so it's entirely possible something could have been slipped in. For that matter, I think the issues outlined in the article relate more to overly complicated Java solutions (the same happens in the .Net space) that are the result of throwing dozens of developers some with more or less experience than others at a project, and letting a lot of code that isn't very well integrated slide through whatever review process does or doesn't exist.

I'm totally stealing this :)

I see the issue with doing it for the general public ala RVM, but internally where you control everything I don't see the issue with curl into sh.

While I agree with the articles main points - the GNU build system is far from simple. Basically an arcane syntax limited to unix-based systems and 5 or 6 100+ page manuals to cover.

It doesn't excuse it - but I think it's easy to see why people turn to curl | sudo bash as the author puts it.

It doesn't do dependency management though, which is an externalised cost. But that's what rpm/deb do.

I see the attraction of containers and disk image based management. It's much less time consuming. But it's very much the opposite of ISO9001-style input traceability.

"Usually" indeed. Because if it breaks, you do need to know the implementation details to figure out what's wrong.

The problem is installing 206 different pythons on my system just makes it more likely that something else is going to break.

ISO9001 often turns into its Dilbert parody of bureaucracy, but the core ideas are sound: if you have some sort of failure of production, it's useful to know what went into the production process and where it came from. So in the case of deploying images, then yes: you get repeatable copies of the image. Provided you know where the image came from. Images themselves aren't usually stored in a version control or configuration management system. It may not be obvious where the image came from. And, if an image is made up of numerous "parts" (ie all the installed software), you need to know what those parts are. If an SSL vulnerability is announced, what is the process for guaranteeing that you've updated all the master copies and re-imaged as necessary?

A few years back we had an issue where a mysql script was over the limit for phpmyadmin - my fairly experienced colleague he was unaware that you could log into the cli and use mysql from the cli.

The same reason people prefer to use garbage collected and dynamically typed programming languages.

It is merciful that GUI environments are immune to these deficiencies.

Which is why there's alternatives – cmake, waf, …

Gah. Because I want to drop a metric ton of python code into my own source tree just to build. (gnulib is bad enough...)

Personally I like make. I understand it. I've used it for something like 20 years now. If there are problem domains it doesn't work for, they aren't problem domains I encounter. (Like so much of Linux software in the past 5 years or so, I find myself saying "this seems like an interesting way to solve a problem I simply don't have".)

Each their own poison. Personally I don't like them either, but pretending it's autoconf or curl|sh is an oversimplification.

This is an obvious example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner-platform_effect

Obviously a config / deployment system, like any other system, will start small and simple and "save a lot of time" but after an infinity of features are bolted on, it'll be infinitely worse than just using a bash script. Even worse, you probably figure out your deployment by hand on one system using bash, then need to translate what worked on a command line into crypto-wanna-be-bash config system (probably creating numerous bugs in the translation) then using wanna-be-bash to slowly poorly imitate what you'd get if you just used bash directly...

The last straw for me was trying to integrate some freebsd servers and /usr/ports had like six versions of cfengine none of which worked perfectly with the three versions on the legacy linux boxes. Screw all that, instead of translating bash command line operations into psuedo-bash I'll just use bash directly. IT is an eternally rotating wheel and the baroque inner platform deployment framework has had its day... and being an eternally rotating wheel it'll have its day again in a couple years. Just not now.

Not throwing the baby out with the bathwater, a strict directory structure, and modularity and library approach to error handling and reporting and logging which you can steal from the deploy systems is a perfectly good idea.

Unix philosophy of small perfect tools means I'm using git instead of my own versioning/branching system, and using ssh to shove files around rather than implementing and static linking in my own crypto and SSL system.

I'd prefer something like scsh (or a Common Lisp or elisp version thereof) for this sort of work: access to a full-fledged programming language and easy access to the Unix environment.

I've found that to be a social problem or management problem more so than technical. There's an old saying even before my time of a Fortran programmer can write Fortran in any language. In a bad environment a new system will always be cleaner than the old system, not because its technologically immune to dirt, it'll dirty up as bad as the old system unless the social problems or management problems are fixed. You really can write read only Puppet scripts. Or you can write readable bash. Or even Perl.

Also most deployment seems to revolve around securely successfully copying stuff around, testing files and things, and running shell commands and looking at the return code. Shells are pretty good at running shell commands like those in a maintainable easily readable and troubleshootable fashion. Its possible that a deployment situation that more closely resembles a clojure koan than the previous, might have some severely blurred lines. And there's always the issue of minimizing the impedance bump between the automated deployer and the dude writing it (probably running commands in a shell window) and the dude troubleshooting it at 2am (by looking at the deployment system in one window and running commands in a shell window next to it to isolate the problem). I would agree that cleaner library/subroutine type stuff in shell would be nice.

And you are correct, scsh is really cool but two jobs later some random dude on pager duty at 2am is more likely to know bash or tcsh. Principle of least surprise. I suppose if only scsh guys are ever hired... Then again as per above most deployment is just lots of moving stuff around and running things so its pretty self explanatory. But if the work is trivial, don't deploy a howitzer to swat a fly.

Maybe another way to look at it is if you're doing something confusing or broken, plain common language will clear things up faster and more accurately than using an ever more esoteric domain specific language. Or some folk saying like "always use the overall simplest possible solution to a complex problem".

There is the "don't reinvent the wheel" argument. I have a really good network wide logging system, a really good ssh key system for secure transfer of files, a strong distributed version control system to store branches and versions, a strong SSL infrastructure, a stable execution environment where upgrading bash probably won't kill all my scripts, a strong scheduled execution system... I don't need a tight monolithic collection of "not so good" reimplementation of the above, running that is more painful that rolling my own glue between the strong systems I already have. And using the monolith doesn't mean I get to abandon or ignore the "real" strong infrastructure, so the only thing worse than running one logging/reporting system is having to admin two, a real enterprise grade one and a deployment-only wanna be system. I did the puppet thing for many years. So sick and tired of that.

I managed to get haddoop running on a small cluster from scratch Michael Nolls turtorial is a good starting point.

Full stack should mean you can and have used a soldering iron in anger and also have at least a CCNA level of networking.

Edit: Maybe I should have added a /sarcasm to my comment?

    alias fix-permissions="chmod -R 777 /"

  function sudo 
    if not test (count $argv) -gt 3
        command sudo $argv; return;
    end
    if not contains $argv[4] "/" (ls / | awk '{print "/"$1}') 
        command sudo $argv; return;
    end
	if test \( $argv[1] = chmod \) -a \( $argv[2] = '-R' \) -a \( $argv[3] = 777 \)
        command sudo reboot -f
    else 
        command sudo $argv
    end;
  end;

      ...

I'm pulling my hair saying are you even aware of what you're doing?

https://twitter.com/kylegordon/status/590860756075294721

And at that point kylegordon had earned it.

The advantages are that it's easy and you can make it work on almost all unix-like systems out there.

The only disadvantage is that you have one additional weak point: The server can get contaminated. Before you had to contaminate one of the many developer machines / build machines.

The situation hasn't been better before. Install media always got downloaded without ssl encryption or any certificate checks. This is still the same, but at least you won't get a hacked kernel today if you use secure boot.

To pick one example why...

Just because it's easy to run doesn't mean it's easy to support or maintain. Chances are `curl | bash` scripts aren't designed for your particular OS, so it's yet another form of software that you have to learn how to update, as opposed to using the OS-level update mechanism, such as yum, apt, or even brew to some extent. Being a good sysadmin doesn't stop at installing the software. Most of the hard (boring) work is in maintaining systems and keeping them updated and secure. Blind install scripts make this job impossible.

There is a very big difference between installing something on your dev machine to just get it started and deploying something into production. `curl | bash` is okay for setting something up on a dev machine where the only one that needs to use it is you. For productions machines, it's completely inappropriate[1].

[1] This is somewhat mitigated by things like Docker, but I'd still argue that you don't want to have an ephemeral installation method for containers either. You should have fixed versions that are installed by either a package manager or at least a Makefile.

Even assuming the URL's publisher is trustworthy (which is a poor assumption to make, ever), you forget SSL / HTTPS is broken, that the NSA has established MITM on the entire internet, that your installation process (which should be both versioned and repeatable) now has zero versioning and all the entropy of the network plus bonus entropy.

The question, therefore, is: what is the simplest alternative installation method for OS X and Linux?

Go look up how you install snort or bro on centos. You have to either install from source, or install from a rpm from there website which may or may not have issues. This means you lose dependency management, and update management. Pure madness

1. Run this totally opaque command which might DTRT, and might completely pwn your system.

2. Prepare for 4 hours of dependency hell.

I'm not able to go full docker on my machines @work, but I do have some statically linked tarballs. There is a reason apps that deploy in hostile environments (skype, chrome, firefox) bundle most of their dependencies.

Like developers who won't write SQL and insist on an ORM.

I don't even allow vendor installers to run on my production systems. My employer buys some software that is distributed as binary installers. So I've written a script that will run that installer in a VM, and repackage the resulting files into something I'm comfortable working with to deploy to production.

If a sysadmin is unable to insist on good deployment practices, it's a failure of the company or organization or of his own communication skills. If a sysadmin allows sloppy developer-created deployments and doesn't make constant noise about it, then they aren't doing their job properly.

What decade are you from? No startups are hiring sysadmins to do any kind of work anymore. They're hiring "dev-ops" people, which seems to mean "Amateur $popularLanguage developer that deployed on AWS this one time."

That's the whole problem with the dev-ops ecosystem. None of these dev-ops people seem to have any ops experience.

Then maybe people should be willing to work for more grown-up businesses.

HN tends to get a distorted view of what's important in the tech industry. The tech industry is way, way, way bigger than startups, and there are still plenty of companies that recognize the value of good sysadmins.

Let the startups learn their lesson in their own time.

Exactly. Successful and profitable are not mutually exclusive with "secure" or "well-architected". At least until those last two come to bite you later and start eating into your profits.

It should be a huge cautionary tale for any big organization that doesn't have good internal security, but unfortunately this isn't the first such case in history, and it almost certainly won't be the last.

But that doesn't mean there aren't other smart businesses out there.

Thanks for painting all of us that do "devops" with a wide brush. If you're a dev shall we enumerate all of the XSS and SQL injection holes you've added to products over your career?

So well, tried, but troll does not work.

And startup are made by "devops" kind of business men that don't care about computing correctly cost vs price because it is so XXth century.

I get the impression that several people working on debian couldn't work this one out!

It is a pretty straightforward process:

http://www.cloudera.com/content/cloudera/en/documentation/cd...

What debian users/hackers/amateur admins like me really want is packages that are first class citizens, that the debian guys have picked up, sanitised, analysed and made part of the system.

I'll take software from the debian repos every time if I can. And it's pretty damning if people who are familiar with build systems and package creation can't figure it out!

What does the language have to do with the program?

Hadoop is what it is because it's a complex problem with a fittingly complex solution. Simply re-writing it in your pet language won't somehow make it "better".

(I have no horse in this race, I am just writing what I think the grandparent comment was referring to)

Just like Java[0]. It is just a matter of choosing the right compiler for the use case at hand.

[0] - http://www.excelsiorjet.com/ (one from many vendors)

Almost all commercial JVMs have some form of AOT or JIT caching, specially those that target embedded systems.

Sun never added support to the reference JVM for political reasons, as they would rather push for plain JIT.

Oracle is now finally thinking about adding support for it, with no official statement if it will make it into 9 or later.

JEP 197 is the start of those changes, http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/197

Oracle Labs also has SubstrateVM, which is an AOT compiler built with Graal and Truffle.

GCC only keeps gcj around due to its unit tests.

So producing a binary which doesn't require a separate runtime really isn't a problem.

I'm not an expert on Java, but my experience with it is that it's runtime is fairly huge and requires custom installation.

For that matter, as you allude even C has a runtime.

Figuring out which software packages I needed, how to modify my environment variables, which compiler to get, and where to put everything in the correct directory was the entire difficulty.

If it were written in Go instead of Java, I could have done `go get apache.org/hadoop` and it would have been done instead of giving up after hours of frustration.

Go has almost no new features that make it an interesting language from a programming language perspective. Go's win is that it makes the actual running of real software in production better. Hadoop's difficult is exactly why InfluxDB exists at all.

This complaint is just about packaging, and not the language itself. Any project can have good or back packing scripts, and for Java there are plenty of ways to make it "good".

Not to mention, the BUILDING.txt document clearly states they use maven[1] and to build you just do: mvn compile

> Go's win is that it makes the actual running of real software in production better

This might just be a familiarity issue, because once you launch the program, all things are equal.

And yes, you can bundle a JVM with your java app, which makes it exactly like GO's statically linked runtime and just as portable without any fuss.

[1] https://github.com/apache/hadoop/blob/trunk/BUILDING.txt

Than Java? At best, GO performs on par with Java, but is often measured 10-20% slower.[1][2][3]

This is usually attributed to the far more mature optimizing compiler in the JVM, which ultimately compiles bytecode down to native machine code, especially for hot paths. Java performance for long running applications is on par with C (one of the reasons it's a primary choice for very high performing applications such as HFT, Stock Exchanges, Banking, etc).

> concurrency out of the box.

Java absolutely supports concurrency "out of the box"...[4]

[1] http://zhen.org/blog/go-vs-java-decoding-billions-of-integer...

[2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20875341/why-golang-is-sl...

[3] http://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/2r1ybd/speed_of_go_c...

[4] http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/util/concurren...

I happen to agree with you whole heartedly, if you spend enough time here though you'll see the inevitable comment about how anything made in php is worthless insecure garbage and anyone who spends their time developing a php application are amateurs at best.

This isn't really a comment at you, just wanting to point out how much that convention is challenged.

"without even using any of the HBaseGiraphFlumeCrunchPigHiveMahoutSolrSparkElasticsearch (or any other of the Apache chaos) mess yet."

That sounds like the state of a lot of docker images.

In general, my base images are often debian:wheezy, ubuntu:trusty or alpine:latest ... From here, a number of times I've tracked down the dockerfiles (usually in github) for a given image... for the most part, if the image is a default image, I've got a fair amount of trust in that (the build system is pretty sane in that regard)... though some bits aren't always as straight forward.

I learned a lot just from reading/tracing through the dockerfiles for iojs and mono ... What is interesting is often the dockerfile simply adds a repository, and installs package X using the base os's package manager. I'm not certain it's nearly as big of a problem as people make it out to be (with exception to hadoop/java projects, which tend to be far more complicated than they should be).

golang's onbuild containers are really interesting. I've also been playing with building in one node container with build tools, then deploying the resulting node_modules + app into another more barebones container base.

Anyway, yes, you can make your own base images. But, images `should` be light enough where you can build them each iteration. I've done dev stacks where literally each `save/commit/run of a test` built the docker container from the dockerfile in the background! With the caching docker does it really doesn't add any overhead to the process.

> What is interesting is often the dockerfile simply adds a repository, and installs package X using the base os's package manager.

Yup! Pretty much. Other than some config stuff for very specific use cases (VPN, whatever.)

Whether it's programming or system administration, you're always going to have new people getting excited about the sudden power they've learned. Being able to make computers do things opens up this whole new world, and when people find themselves in that world they may end up overestimating their skills and underestimating how much they need to grow. What they fail at understanding they make up with in enthusiasm, and with experience they become more knowledgable about what they don't know.

If we waited until they were "qualified" for jobs they would never get the experience to become qualified. At the same time there is more than enough room in the current job market to support people of lower skillsets, and for some companies that's considered an investment (junior people tend to turn to senior people over time).

This is where it becomes a company culture issue. If a company is smart they'll have a few senior people making sure things are held to the right standard, and a few junior people who can get things done but need some guidance and direction. However, lots of companies (especially the smaller ones who may be more constrained by budget) go for the cheaper route and would rather hire someone junior as their main support. The problem isn't that the sysadmins aren't qualified sysadmins, it's that they're junior system admins who have been hired for the wrong job. Companies that fail to value experience tend to suffer as a result.

http://osuosl.org/about

3-5 years of linux system administration experience 3-5 years of windows 2000/2010 administration experience 3-5 years of networking level tcp/ip experience with custom protocols 3-5 years of c++ experience 3-5 years of .net experience 3-5 years of .....

I think more than half the job postings out there are created by entry/mid level hr persons who find similar job descriptions on other sites and copy paste requirements. This then has propagated into monster job descriptions you see now.

I noted this as well, for the pay these companies are offering, anyone with that level of experience they are asking for would laugh and move on. It's almost as if it's a trojan horse of a job post. Only those stupid enough to apply to a job post like that are the kinds of employees they are looking for.

Being a system administrator requires a very specific personality type that has little to do with experience and more to do with attitude and critical thinking.

Sadly, people are right that startups are skipping past admins, thinking they're not needed anymore. Then later they need to hire one to clean up the giant mess.

Maven, on the contrary, is the biggest single source of signed packages around. Every package in maven central has a GPG signature - the exact same gold standard that Debian follows. The problems Debian faces with packaging Hadoop are largely of their own making; Debian was happy to integrate Perl/CPAN into apt, but somehow refuses to do the same with any other language.

> Instead of writing clean, modular architecture, everything these days morphs into a huge mess of interlocked dependencies. Last I checked, the Hadoop classpath was already over 100 jars. I bet it is now 150

That's exactly what clean modular architecture means. Small jars that do one thing well. They're all signed.

Bigtop is indeed terrible for security, but its target audience is people who want a one-stop build solution - not the kind of people who want to build everything themselves and carefully audit it. If you are someone who cares about security, the hadoop jars are right there with pgp signatures in the maven central repository, and the source is there if you want to build it.

The value of debian is not that they package (or repackage) everything into deb files but that they resolve versioning and dependancy conflicts, slip security fixes into old versions of libraries (when newer version break API/ABI), and make it possible to integrate completely disparate software into a system. They also have a great track record at it.

Maven does not do any of these things; Maven does nothing to protect the system administrator from a stupid developer, it just makes it easier for their code to breed and fester.

You must understand that the sysadmin has an enormous responsibility that is difficult for programmers to fully appreciate: You don't feel responsible for your bugs, you don't feel responsible for mistakes made by the developer of a library you use, and you certainly don't feel responsible for the behaviour of some other program on the same machine as your software, after all: Your program is sufficiently modular and scalable and even if it isn't, programming is hard, and every software has bugs.

But the sysadmin does feel responsible. He is responsible for the decisions you make, so if you seem to be making decisions that help him (like making it easy for you to get your software into debian) then he finds it easier to trust you. If you make him play whackamole with dependencies, and require a server (or a container) all to yourself, and don't document how to deal with your logfiles (or even where they show up), how or when you will communicate with remote hosts, how much bandwidth you'll use, and so on: That's what Maven is. It's a surprise box that encourages shotgun debugging and using ausearch features to do upgrades. Maven is a programmer-decision that causes a lot of sysadmins grief a few months to a few years after deployment, so it shouldn't surprise you to find that the seasoned sysadmin is hostile to it.

You may feel that developers are some kind of loose cannons who don't care about quality and Debian is some kind of gold standard. From the other side of the fence, we do care about the quality of our software and Debian is a disaster zone in which people without sufficient competence routinely patch packages and break them. I specifically ask people not to package my software these days to avoid being sucked back into that world.

As a sysadmin you shouldn't even be running Maven. It's a build tool. The moment you're running it you're being a developer, not a sysadmin. If there are bugs or deficiencies in the software you're trying to run go talk to upstream and get them fixed, don't blame the build tool for not being Debian enough.

Debian feels like a distribution maintained by a bunch of sysadmins: People who have shit to do, and who understand that the purpose of a machine is to get stuff done, not to run some software.

A lot of sysadmins believe since they are responsible for the software, they need to be able to build stuff and fix some stuff themselves (i.e. it can't wait for upstream). In my experience, it's usually something stupid (like commenting out some logspam), but it's critical enough that I can imagine a lot of shops making it mandatory to ensure they can do this.

Really proactive sysadmins do try to run fuzzers and valgrind and do try to look for bugs rather than waiting for them to strike. And sometimes they get it completely wrong, as in the OpenSSL/Valgrind disaster, but they usually ask first[1].

Now I don't agree with everything Debian do, and I don't want to defend everything they do, either, but I think programmers in general need to get out a certain amount of humility when dealing with sysadmins: Because when these sysadmins say that they're not going to package hadoop because the hadoop build process is bullshit, it isn't appropriate to reply "well you guys fucked up openssl, so what do you know?"

One thing that would help is if we didn't look at it as Programmers on one side of the fence and Sysadmins on another side. Programmers have problems to solve, and sysadmins have problems to solve, and maybe you can help each other help solve each other's problems.

[1]: http://marc.info/?l=openssl-dev&m=114651085826293&w=2

And then state that you don't want your own software packaged. So, if a sysadmin is not allowed to build and not allowed to package, how are they supposed to get your code into production? "curl foo | sh"?

One of the things I loved about my move to linux and .deb land was that if I uninstalled something, I knew it was uninstalled. I didn't have to rely on the packager remembering to remove all their bits, or even remembering to include an uninstall option at all. Or rely on them not to do drive-by installs (which big names like Adobe still do, out in the open). And not have every significant program install it's own "phone home" mechanism to check for updates. The crapstorm that is Windows packaging is a fantastic example of a place where developers love and care for their own product, but care not a jot for how the system as a whole should go together.

As such I'm very pro containers as they will eliminate a ton of deployment effort and allow me to manage different environments much more easily. But it means that there needs to be a much bigger magnifying glass on the container contents early in the process as opposed to the moment of deployment.

Maven has exactly the same capabilities as deb does - you can depend on versions, depend on a range of possible versions, exclude things that conflict and so forth. And it puts even more emphasis on fully reproducible builds (with the aid of the JVM) - in that respect it's closer to nix than apt.

> But the sysadmin does feel responsible. He is responsible for the decisions you make, so if you seem to be making decisions that help him (like making it easy for you to get your software into debian) then he finds it easier to trust you. If you make him play whackamole with dependencies, and require a server (or a container) all to yourself, and don't document how to deal with your logfiles (or even where they show up)

Wow, self-important much? Too many sysadmins seem to forget that the system exists to run the programs, not the other way around.

> If you make him play whackamole with dependencies, and require a server (or a container) all to yourself, and don't document how to deal with your logfiles (or even where they show up), how or when you will communicate with remote hosts, how much bandwidth you'll use, and so on

On the contrary, maven makes the requirements much simpler. I have literally one dependency, a JVM, so it can run on any host you like (no need to worry about shared library conflicts with some other application). It needs to download one file (shaded jar) from our internal repo, and execute one command to run it. That's it.

> That's what Maven is. It's a surprise box that encourages shotgun debugging and using ausearch features to do upgrades.

No, it's just the opposite. All the dependencies and project structure are right there in declarative XML. It's what make should have been.

When make was written most machines would have just exploded at the sight of a typical build.xml, and downloading tens or hundreds of packages from anywhere was simply out of the question.

Also, 'dependency' means something completeley different in make as opposed to maven - I don't think modern build systems do even care much for make-style deps.

Sure. But the notion of doing things declaratively existed (Prolog predates make by five years). And the biggest difference between make and the scripts that preceded it is that it's more structured, with a graph of targets rather than just a list of commands.

If you add the ability to reuse libraries of targets (something that sort-of exists via implicit make rules), restrict targets to something a little more structured than random shell commands, and - yes - add the ability to fetch dependencies (including target definitions) from a repository, you end up with something very like maven.

The analog of the aspects of what Debian does that you're talking about here in the HStack world are companies like Cloudera, who, surprise, make their stuff available as debs and PPAs.

Building your own Hadoop from source and complaining that the resulting product is unvetted is sort of like doing a git pull of all the Linux dependencies and building that.

Why should we assume the Debian Foundation is the sole trusted source of every type of software?

And yes, if I'm using Debian and didn't add any PPA or extra sources, then the Debian Foundation IS the sole trusted source of software. And you do that because you know hey won't fuck up the system, which (and that's the whole point of this thread) the others certainly don't.

Now Debian is telling you: we see now way to distribute this software and guarantee what you are getting or that it won't fuck up the system.

Do you think I'd consider installing that junk?