Can you install your own software when being an IT system admin

Unrelated to your question, but I'd suggest practicing typing. With Linux especially, typing commands is a common activity and if you type with this accuracy, who knows what may happen. You may kill the entire system. You may also accidentally discover aliens. It's anyone's guess, but the most likely is whatever you want to happen, won't, because you type as accurately as a storm trooper.
 
kronoSX said:
she died 5 years ago,hijack her car and shot her twice..if you must know.since then had standby ones .Is this the answer you looking for.I nogal miss her, but its ok i got over the grief.It took years but i am ok now
Click to expand...
You sound like a guy that got banned for talking kak on www.ps3za.co.za years ago. Is that you Noodle?
 
UrBaN963 said:
Unrelated to your question, but I'd suggest practicing typing. With Linux especially, typing commands is a common activity and if you type with this accuracy, who knows what may happen. You may kill the entire system. You may also accidentally discover aliens. It's anyone's guess, but the most likely is whatever you want to happen, won't, because you type as accurately as a storm trooper.
Click to expand...
yes i know a . and a .. means current directory and .. means one up.I am aware this is why i apologies cause i was typing with one hand in the bloody dark ok.
 
In the bank i had my local admin rights taken away whilst being a domain admin.

Think about that for a second. It makes sense while looking at the job title and what account you should be using for maintenance and such like. But that’s 100% red tape and auditors were watching.

It makes sense in a perfect infrastructure. But tell me when last in a ever evolving IT environment have you seen perfection?
 
You aren’t using any resources running something temporarily and stopping it again.

And as an Admin any tool that makes your job easier or more efficient is a good idea.

Linux being Linux many things are standard on one version but not another and it’s really just a matter of opinion which was chosen.

Oversight on Linux servers is few and far between so unlikely to even be policed, but also it’s literally your job so you should be trusted enough to do reasonable risk analysis of what is and isn’t a good idea.

I’ll very quickly install things like htop, nmap, ping etc if I’m troubleshooting some issue and never bother removing them after. But from the official sources, it’s not much different than opening Notepad on windows or grabbing paint from the Microsoft Store.

Where it’s quite different is the end user populace and protecting them from themselves and they aren’t ever going to touch a Linux server to begin with.

The dangerous changes would rather be firewalling and opening ports etc that could expose a server to nefarious entities.

Usually these things are more a case of monitoring and alerting rather than actively being allowed or not. Infosec sees you installing htop from the default repo they’ll likely not even blink. They see you install htop from some dodgy GitHub repo and you can expect some questions.

Open the firewall to 0.0.0.0/0 and expect your account to be locked and a potential disciplinary.
 
Last edited:
kronoSX said:
I was mostly talking about cli applications that work with bash if its not available via updates or upgrades..I would like to do linux admin ,wanna go in that direction,i think another 2 years of intense study will make me linux ready.
Click to expand...

Short answer is it really depends on the size and scale of the company as well as the industry.

Generally the “I need to install this random software” amounts to a lack skill with Linux more than anything else.
 
Crowley said:
Get yourself a cheap second hand server and install what you want on it at home while you are learning.

Also, you are going to need to work on your punctuation especially if you are going to be using CLI. A space or full stop in the wrong place will give you hours of headaches.
Click to expand...

And second to this skip the copy and paste, it’s s recipe for disaster.

Accidentally copying someone’s prompt with a > in and suddenly you zero out the Python binary.

Copy and paste rm -rf /var/log/stuff.log and drop the var/log bit and you are in a world of ****.
 
SauRoNZA said:
And second to this skip the copy and paste, it’s s recipe for disaster.

Accidentally copying someone’s prompt with a > in and suddenly you zero out the Python binary.

Copy and paste rm -rf /var/log/stuff.log and drop the var/log bit and you are in a world of ****.
Click to expand...
yes i know the logs will be deleted, but i can set up to use bash for vebose and add switch to confirm delete............then type in yes.......this is the way right
 
SauRoNZA said:
Short answer is it really depends on the size and scale of the company as well as the industry.

Generally the “I n
SauRoNZA said:
Short answer is it really depends on the size and scale of the company as well as the industry.

Generally the “I need to install this random software” amounts to a lack skill with Linux more than anything else.
Click to expand...

Ok for example say the system you working on only has top, can i install htop and another example say there is only if config but for ip command can i install this.I dont want to install other programs just cli stuff that makes life a little better.
Click to expand...
 
kronoSX said:
yes i know the logs will be deleted, but i can set up to use bash for vebose and add switch to confirm delete............then type in yes.......this is the way right
Click to expand...

You missed my point entirely.

If you copy and pasted it wrong and dropped some of the content then you end up with “rm -rf /“ which is a disaster.

And in the real world you can’t go confirming every single file you’d sit there for hours.

The better way would be not to use absolute paths and work from inside the directory you need to be, but everything is circumstantial and that’s why fully understanding what you are doing is so important and not just copying things.

Let’s say you copied this command…

Code: 
root@linux:~# > python somefile.py

So you copied “> python somefile.py” because you don't' quite know what's what with python.

What do you expect to happen when you paste that in? Without going to Google it.
 
Last edited:
SauRoNZA said:
You missed my point entirely.

If you copy and pasted it wrong and dropped some of the content then you end up with “rm -rf /“ which is a disaster.

And in the real world you can’t go confirming every single file you’d sit there for hours.

The better way would be not to use absolute paths and work from inside the directory you need to be, but everything is circumstantial and that’s why fully understanding what you are doing is so important and not just copying things.

Let’s say you copied this command…

Code: 
root@linux:~#> python somefile.py

So you copied “> python somefile.py”

What do you expect to happen when you paste that in? Without going to Google it.
Click to expand...
That won't blat the python exec unless you're running it from wherever python is installed. It'll just create an empty file called python in $PWD

Agree with don't copy and paste though.
 
Sinbad said:
STUFF
Click to expand...
Shoosh man, this is a teaching moment.

I was getting to that point depending on where it is...but I've literally seen this happen and bring an entire system down, so it's just an illustration of how something seemingly simple can kill an application. If memory serves python was packaged as a binary with the application so as to version control it and not use the system one and it was run from within the working folder and took days to figure out wtf was going on.

Also why > in a prompt is ****ing terrible.
 
Last edited:
kronoSX said:
Ok for example say the system you working on only has top, can i install htop and another example say there is only if config but for ip command can i install this.I dont want to install other programs just cli stuff that makes life a little better.
Click to expand...
In my entire career nobody has ever stopped me from doing any of these things, but I do expect in some companies they would have monitoring tools operating at that level...it would all depend on the policy from one company to another.

You'll find ip is the default now and ifconfig is deprecated and the exact opposite will happen where people will want to install ifconfig because they don't want to get with the program and learn the new thing. Willing to bet on many of those systems ifconfig isn't even real and just an alias for the ip command that provides the same data.
 
SauRoNZA said:
In my entire career nobody has ever stopped me from doing any of these things, but I do expect in some companies they would have monitoring tools operating at that level...it would all depend on the policy from one company to another.

You'll find ip is the default now and ifconfig is deprecated and the exact opposite will happen where people will want to install ifconfig because they don't want to get with the program and learn the new thing. Willing to bet on many of those systems ifconfig isn't even real and just an alias for the ip command that provides the same data.
Click to expand...
you mean its a shorcut now to ip,so they think they using IF but it a link to ip.....lol
Symbolic link is this the correct term and remember i am still studying linux so go easy.I am really exited about all this for a longtime and finally i understand stuff you all talking about gawd damn exiting i tell you
So i will be asking alot of questions during my studies.I still need to touch on bash scripts but that is for another day far far away.

So all in all its company policies that determine what can be done and it varies from place to place.I will load that in my memory bank.
 
kronoSX said:
you mean its a shorcut now to ip,so they think they using IF but it a link to ip.....lol
Symbolic link is this the correct term and remember i am still studying linux so go easy.I am really exited about all this for a longtime and finally i understand stuff you all talking about gawd damn exiting i tell you
So i will be asking alot of questions during my studies.I still need to touch on bash scripts but that is for another day far far away.

So all in all its company policies that determine what can be done and it varies from place to place.I will load that in my memory bank.
Click to expand...

No it’s an alias like I said.

symbolic link is something entirely different relating to the file system.

Aliases are configured in your shell (bash) as sort of shortcuts yes.

You'll find on most systems that "Is" is actually "ls -l” and “vi” actually is running “vim” and a great many other standard ease of use things like that.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X