Among the reasons SamR is not a SysAdmin

Warning! Technical issues ahead!

Although I worked as a system administrator while in grad school [1] and I administer my own machines, I generally do not administer machines that others use. Why not? Because I don’t think like a SysAdmin. Let’s explore today’s adventure to see what that means.

This week, I am running a data science code camp. We are having the students use Jupyter to explore various data sets. To make things work better [2], we’ve set up a JupyterHub server. Because we have a server, the students should be able to access their work from anywhere. I think there are also some collaboration features.

But someone has to run the server and that someone is me. Setting things up wasn’t bad. Dealing with the conflicts between Apache (already running on our VS [3]) and JupyterHub was interesting, but something I could handle. I was too lazy to remember how to start a service at startup, so I just started a tmux session to run the JupyterHub server. All seemed well and good.

And then today, someone asked me to install a new Python package. That should be easy. I normally type /usr/bin/sudo pip install PACKAGE [4] to install Python packages. But this time, I got an error.

$ sudo pip install demakein
The directory '/home/administrator/.cache/pip/http' or its parent directory is not owned by the current user and the cache has been disabled. Please check the permissions and owner of that directory. If executing pip with sudo, you may want sudo's -H flag.
The directory '/home/administrator/.cache/pip' or its parent directory is not owned by the current user and caching wheels has been disabled. check the permissions and owner of that directory. If executing pip with sudo, you may want sudo's -H flag.
Collecting demakein
  Downloading demakein-0.16.tar.gz (298kB)
    100% |████████████████████████████████| 307kB 1.6MB/s 
    Complete output from command python setup.py egg_info:
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "", line 1, in 
      File "/tmp/pip-build-kbtu5q7_/demakein/setup.py", line 10
        exec f.readline()
             ^
    SyntaxError: invalid syntax
    
    ----------------------------------------
Command "python setup.py egg_info" failed with error code 1 in /tmp/pip-build-kbtu5q7_/demakein/

You may note that I was careless in my command … I did not type the full path to sudo. That’s okay; it’s a fresh system and I’m pretty confident that I get the right sudo. I have in the past. You will also note that there are way too many error messages. The first set seem to be because it’s attempting to store things in the administrator account. That’s strange. But there’s also the problem executing readline(). It struck me that I might have to address the first issue by running the command directly as root. So here’s what I tried next.

$ sudo su
# cd
# pip install demakein

I no longer got the directory ownership message. However, I continued to get the same message that follows Collecting demakein. I did a quick Web search for some ideas, made a few changes, and then tried to run the command again, without thinking carefully.

# !s

Can you tell what happened? Let me help you out a bit. !s means repeat the last command that starts with the letter s. I was thinking of the sudo pip install demakein command that I typed. But I wasn’t running the command under the administrator account, I was running the command under the root account. Can you guess what the last command someone executed as root was that started with s?

Any ideas?

I would have thought it was something like su apache, because I was doing some work on the Web server [6]. But I’d done that through sudo.

Well, it turns out that the last s command was shutdown. No, not /sbin/shutdown. Just shutdown. So my !s [7] shut down the server immediately. With all of our campers logged in. And it’s a virtual machine, so I had no idea how to reboot it [8].

Are there morals to this story? Certainly.

• Don’t attempt changes to a system at critical times if you can avoid it.
• Don’t rely on command history when you’re in root mode.
• Try not to do work in root mode.
• Don’t try to install stupid Python packages when your son asks you to.
• Don’t hire me as your SysAdmin [9].

[1] And yes, that’s one of the reasons I use vi rather than Emacs.

[2] Or at least I thought it would make things work better.

[3] If a VM is a virtual machine, a VS should be a virtual server.

[4] su is normally the switch user or super user command. sudo is an alternative that allows you to do do some root tasks, but not all of them. I was taught to prefix important commands with their full path name, so I try to type /usr/bin/sudo rather than just sudo. pip is the Python package installer.

[5] I did not choose the id administrator for the non-root admin account. But I seem to be stuck with it, at least until I decide to spend some time playing with the system.

[6] Apache is a Web server. On some installations, the Apache account is www. On some systems, the Apache account is httpd. On some systems, the account is apache.

[7] Pronounced bang s.

[8] I knew to call ITS. And the person I talked to knew how to reboot the machine. But they also had no idea how I could reboot the machine myself. Maybe that’s why JDS likes physical servers.

[9] I probably shouldn’t post this musing to LinkedIn.

Version 1.0 of 2017-07-26.