
Show HN: Sysadmin Casts – simple bite-sized sysadmin screencasts - WestCoastJustin
http://sysadmincasts.com
======
WestCoastJustin
Here's a site I've been working on for over a year now. Actually posted to HN
asking for feedback on the idea [1]. So far, it's been a slow road, no over
night success or anything, slowly building the site and releasing new episodes
as I have time.

Personally, it has been a major growing experience, and showed me the power of
the internet. People from all over the world are emailing me out of the blue
(and it's not spam!). Almost jaw dropping to think about it. If you have an
idea, work on it, release it, refine it, and see where it goes. I had always
just sat on my ideas.

Happy to answer any questions, comments, or concerns.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5828603](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5828603)

~~~
peterwwillis
Comment: There are thousands of guides, HOWTOs, forums, mailing lists, etc out
there to teach you how to set up basic tools in Linux. To me this doesn't
constitute being a sysadmin and is only a small part of the job.

It would be really neat if you interviewed a bunch of sysadmins with long
resumes, maybe people who give talks at LISA, NANOG, etc. People from
different industries probably have vastly different work environments. Ask
them if they have any noteworthy experiences, lessons learned, or tips that
work towards developing the career versus just Linux-literacy. There's a lot
of knowledge out there that isn't written down anywhere.

~~~
jordan0day
I'll counter with the fact that I think consistent, accurate, and up-to-date
"basic usage" information is still really hard to come by for a linux newbie.
The thousands of guides, HOWTOs, forums, mailing lists, etc just means that in
addition to trying to learn the system, they also have to learn how to
separate the wheat from the chaff, information-wise.

I've known plenty of people who are very good programmers or Windows admin-
types who would make very good linux sysadmins, but for the huge hurdle of not
_learning linux_ , but _learning how to learn linux_.

That's not to discount your suggestion around expert tips/war stories/etc.,
though.

------
jordan0day
There's something about this site that's very www-of-1996 for me, in the best
way possible.

That is, here's a site full of useful information, obviously created by
someone who is interested in the subject and cares about it. And not a single
"Subscribe for $X a month now!" button to be found. No "call to action" to
bleet/myface/instasnap all my friends a link. No "enter your contact info to
be funneled into my sales lead generator service that's the actual reason for
this site to exist" text box.

It's freaking refreshing. This reminds me of back in the day when _most_
webpages were basically "Here's something I care about and think is cool.
Here's what I have to share regarding it. No, I don't expect anything in
return, other than maybe a friendly email or two." These types of sites still
exist, but they seem to be a distinct minority.

~~~
WestCoastJustin
Thanks for the kind words. Originally, I didn't even want to host a mailing
list (via "get notified" link in the header), but tptacek convinced me it was
a good idea [1], and he was right, it opened an invaluable communication
channel with my viewers. In the future, I might follow the 90s shareware
model, use till you find it useful, then donate. But we'll see how it plays
out. Just felt strange asking for money when I didn't think I had enough
content/wasn't good enough yet.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5828686](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5828686)

------
caio1982
Oh, that's really neat! Just a small idea, if you don't mind: perhaps you
could have a list (either curated or crowd sourced) of eventual topics to be
covered in future screencasts so people can upvote or downvote them according
to their preference? This way you'd know your audience and they'd tell you in
advance how to drive the production of the screencasts. Anyway, I've shared it
with friends already and have also subscribed for the next screencasts. Good
job, Justin!

~~~
WestCoastJustin
Wow, this is a great idea. Thanks, I'll put something together so everyone is
on the _same page_!

~~~
nstart
A suggestion to help you avoid building something out right now. Use a public
Trello board. Add each idea as a card and have one card specific for people to
comment on. The cards you add can go into a list called "potential stuff" and
people can vote on them.

(This is kind of how to the Trello team works as well. They have a public dev
board for people to see what's coming up and what's just been released.)

Good luck with the project. Thank you so much for this. It's extremely useful

~~~
WestCoastJustin
Funny you mention Trello, because that is what I'm using right now for all my
ideas ;) I have lots of lists with cards for the different idea types. It's
actually really nice because behind each card you can have notes, checklists,
etc. So, as I'm researching the ideas I'm updating the cards.

~~~
nstart
I've had a Trello card system up as well. I kept my ideas dumped into it
publicly in hopes that that would raise my accountability and get me off my
procrastinating ass to get work done. My procrastinating ass turned out to be
much stronger than I expected sadly. Even so, the system is gold and I use it
in organizing pretty much everything I need to do.

(I also pledge, that the day I start earning money from my side projects, if I
ever release that is, I'll buy into their paid plan).

------
danso
Really happy to see this project get more attention (I just heard about it
today). The screencasts alone are well-produced enough to make it worth
bookmarking, but the impressive part is the well-formatted transcripts...it's
already a pain to edit video well, nevermind try to match it up with text and
code. I'd demand that this be considered best and required practice, but
that's a lot of work to ask from independent screencasters, but when it's
done, it makes the content so much more accessible and consumable.

Also what's neat, at least to a novice like me, is the kind of basics that get
covered...sysadmin involves so many different systems and technologies it's
difficult to know where the hell to start from, short of shadowing someone at
their day job. There's a great foundation here...and thanks to the near-
timelessness of *.nix, it's one that will be valuable and relevant, hopefully,
for the next few decades. Kudos to the OP.

~~~
WestCoastJustin
The transcripts are probably the since most commented on feature. It is a lot
of work, but having something that you can copy/paste if you are trying to do
this yourself, is something worth putting the effort into. I sometimes even
find myself coming back to an episode and looking at the commands ;)

Just wanted to say, thanks for the kind words!

------
hyperliner
Ok, I just had to come here after watching Episode 24 end to end. I had always
wanted to learn about the concept of containers and your episode has
illuminated me. Next will be Episode 14.

One comment: I only came here to see how to compensate you for my learning.
Look, you spent a lot of time on this. You are trying to be nice and
everything, but I think if I gave you a $20 then you would save on a meal,
which anybody can appreciate. I know you are going to say "No, no need"
whatever. Which is ok. But remember that you need to see some good impact on
your bottom line so that you can keep this going.

That's all. Send us a paypal link or whatever.

Thank you for teaching me something today that I really wanted to learn. And
in 20 minutes!

~~~
WestCoastJustin
Thanks for the kind words ;)

------
kureikain
Great resource. Free. What can I say more.

I think one of issue of SysAdmin is that when you read a tutorial and type the
command the result, the output is just different and you have no way to
validate that the method/command/param is right.

Now with the video, all are there. I know it worked for s.o. If if isn't on my
machine, it's my own problem.

I think you should contact
[http://serversforhackers.com/](http://serversforhackers.com/) to get some
advertisement for increasing traffic. It has no way this kind of resource get
into the dust.

Hope many people upvote to let this great resource spread out itself.

------
msaspence
"Shut up and take my money!"

PLEASE CHARGE MONEY for this, as great as the stuff you have up looks already
I can't help think how much more time and energy you could devote to this if
your were charging a small subscription service. I'm thinking similar to
RailsCasts at $9/month

As a web developer who is trying to do more and more sysadmin stuff I can say
that this kind of resource is just what I need. Syadmin seems to be trailing
way behind development in terms of resources for people looking to get
started.

------
dmix
Subscribed. Could you do one on using MAC such as SELinux or ideally
GRSecurity?

Too many people end up disabling them and putting their box at a much higher
risk of compromise.

~~~
WestCoastJustin
Yes, absolutely on both SELinux/GRSecurity fronts. I 100% agree that they get
disabled because no one knows what they hell they are doing and just need them
to get out of the way. If there was some simple tutorials then this would
probably go a looong way. I've added them to the list.

------
Sammi
Looks really good. GJ :)

One feature suggestion: User comments on casts. Could be done with up/down
voting. This gives the users a possibility to help each other clear up things
they were unclear on after watching a video. Look at Kahn Academy for an
example of what I'm thinking.

------
endlessvoid94
Excellent. Just excellent. Now that many web developers use heroku right out
of the gate, they've never had to really dive too deeply into unix (newbies,
that is).

Throw a stripe checkout for $10 / month on there and you've got an excellent
business.

~~~
joshdotsmith
And keep in mind that many of us will very happily pay for this. I think it's
admirable to want to do this for free, but it's unsustainable. You deserve to
be paid for your time. And it will only create a feedback loop of higher
quality content that more people want, which you can gauge by whether people
are paying.

~~~
richardw
I know someone who does very well off a how-to website, no payments but
advertising and evergreen content. Especially since customers are Linuxy, he
might not want to put a paywall up unless he's very sure. Alternatively,
create videos for tools that only real companies would use and charge for
those. E.g. Puppet, Chef etc.

------
richardw
Maybe put some of the commands / tools used near the top (e.g. RHS) and/or tag
the videos with them somewhere. You could then have one or many aggregation
pages highlighting ways to use certain commands or tools.

~~~
WestCoastJustin
Thanks for the feedback! This might help find related episodes more easily.
For example, that puppet and vagrant might go together, etc. Maybe even a
master list of commands and then links out to the episodes or something. I'll
ponder this and put something together.

------
kintamanimatt
It would be great if you had a Twitter account to notify of new screencasts
too!

~~~
WestCoastJustin
In the works (also, thanks for the feedback)!

------
mrmondo
While I like the idea, the content seems to be aimed at a very junior
audience, almost really for desktop support techs that are thinking of career
progression. It would be great to see some more advanced material on topics
such as kernel / network tuning, PostgreSQL clustering, btrfs workflows and
automation, service discovery (serf, consul, etcd), ruby for Sysadmins, backup
automation etc etc etc

~~~
WestCoastJustin
Yeah, I hear you. HN users caio1982, actually had an awesome idea, it was to
create a page on the site where users could up/down vote and submit episode
idea [1]. This might be a good way to get the pulse of what people want.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8011626](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8011626)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
The sysadmin stackoverflow might be a good source of ideas for episodes too.

------
Hyetigran
read sysadmin cats, got very excited until I clicked on link...

Edit: great source nonetheless

~~~
bzalasky
I did the same thing!

------
sam152
Why did you decide to use a custom video player and not an established service
like YouTube or Vimeo? I think a lot of people forget how much time these
services spend optimising their video players and delivery. Plus, these
services are another avenue of content discovery.

Can't see any reasons against using one of these services.

~~~
yardie
The only reason to use Youtube at this point is to get eyeballs. I can see 2
problems with YT.

1\. Their contentID system makes you have to prove you are not a thief.

2\. Shifting revenue stream distribution are only ever good for Youtube first
and publishers second. They are a big organization now. Some would say a
monopoly. If they can't get 10% revenue growth from their users they'll carve
it from under their publishers.

I think YT and Vimeo are really good but even I enjoy having a healthy market
where all types of players exist.

------
_pmf_
You should probably call it devops, since everyone who has ever written part
of a shell script is a devop.

~~~
Ecio78
..maybe since we started using that buzzword 5 or so years ago, but sysadmins
have written shell scripts since the birth of *NIX operating systems...

------
bzalasky
I initially read the title as 'Sysadmin Cats'... which could be funny if it
got the Oatmeal treatment. That said, I'm interested in watching some
screencasts when I get a chance. It looks like you already have a decent and
growing library. Nice work!

------
mehulkar
Continuous play would be nice! Watching all 27 episodes in one sitting to get
up to speed.

------
netcraft
This looks great, and super useful! My only suggestion would be to enhance the
player to allow me to playback at 1.5x and 2x speed. The HTML5 player on
youtube has this and once you start using it, you want it everywhere.

------
PeterWhittaker
Nicely done, good work. I just tweeted about this, you deserve traffic and
kudos.

~~~
WestCoastJustin
Hey, thanks! I'll check out that issue with adblockplus too.

------
srik
Great content.

How are you handling hosting for your videos and are the costs manageable?

~~~
WestCoastJustin
I am using AWS S3/CloudFront (should probably do an episode on it ;). Just to
give you an idea of how awesome it is. There were 200+ people on the site when
this hit the front page [1]. The site is still really fast and the bill will
likely be less than $5.

[1] [http://i.imgur.com/MR4hctd.png](http://i.imgur.com/MR4hctd.png)

------
rwl4
Neat videos! Have you considered adding media enclosures to your RSS feed so
it is a podcast? I usually watch videos like these on the go.

~~~
WestCoastJustin
Yes, someone actually emailed me with a script to make this happen (even
included a diff of my current rss feed to the new one -- blown away). I will
be adding this shortly!

------
JoshTheGeek
Your video player does not show controls
([http://cdn.sublimevideo.net/js/03un6j5a.js](http://cdn.sublimevideo.net/js/03un6j5a.js)
as linked in the HTML redirects to
[http://sublimevideo.net](http://sublimevideo.net), not JS)

~~~
WestCoastJustin
What OS/browser are you using? Here's a screenshot of the controls on my box
ubuntu/firefox @
[http://i.imgur.com/cI19BOl.png](http://i.imgur.com/cI19BOl.png)

Do you have adblock/noscript/flashblock running?

------
saravanaram
looks great

