Sysadmin Day 2020: IT Heroes and Homelabs

We’re excited to host a contest for Sysadmin Day 2020: IT Heroes and Homelabs. All week long, we’re celebrating with a retweet to win contest, simply retweet the post below with the hashtags #SysadminDay #NetdataWin and you’ll be entered to win some Netdata swag!

Our celebration will include sharing Netdata staffers’ workstations and their specs to give you a glimpse into how our global team works.

We invite you to join in the fun and encourage you to share with us your homelabs, battlestations, workstations, or wherever you set up shop to get your job done.

Happy Sysadmin Day!

Happy Sysadmin Day!

We’re continuing the IT Heroes and Homelabs celebrations🎉 Here are a few more Netdata employee workstations.

We invite you to join in the fun and share your’s as well and to retweet our Twitter post below with the hashtags #SysadminDay #NetdataWin to get entered to win some Netdata swag. Enjoy!

Homelabs, battlestations, workstations, and more

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Dmitry Mikryukov is a Frontend Developer, using an “Asus N752 Laptop SSD Evo 970 and Asus as media center\torrent controller\smart home controller\simple home server for pet projects: Tinker Board”

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Nicolás Parada, Backend Developer, has a setup that includes a Lenovo S940 running Windows (monitoring Docker with Netdata), a piano “collecting dust until the day I decide to play it,” an electrical standing desk, and is elevating his lighting game with some RGB lights and an Xiaomi lamp.

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An upgraded laptop by Markos Fountoulakis, Senior Software Engineer at Netdata. In his words,

"This is my laptop, naked. Top left would be the DVD-WR device, bottom left would be the HDD, they’re both missing in this picture, so what I did was upgrade my laptop, almost completely. I upgraded my HDD (should be bottom left) to a 2TB drive, I upgraded my other disk drive (bottom right) to a 512GB NVMe SSD drive, those are very fast, so the fast drive is the boot drive, the slow one is for archival storage (lots of data). I upgraded my main memory (2 RAM stick bottom-center) to 32GB of RAM and I also upgraded my WiFi card (top-center-left) to a fast 5GHz one. Typically, people don’t upgrade their laptops, because it’s either too troublesome or impossible because the components are soldered on the mainboard, so that’s my desktop-like laptop.”

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Senior SRE Mansour Behabadi, “Most of what you see here are small electronics modules/components. Everything orange is 3d printed, including the laptop stand!”

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Here we have @ilyam8 (Ilyam Mashchenko), workstation, an Integration Engineer on the team.
PC:
OS:
Distro: Manjaro Linux
Kernel: 5.7.9-1-MANJARO x86_64
CPU: 6-Core Intel Core i5-9400F
Mem: 32 GB
Storage: HP SSD EX950 512GB
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960
Laptop (MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2015)):
OS: macOS Catalina 10.15.5
CPU: 2,2 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7
Mem: 16 GB
Storage: SSD 256 GB
Graphics: Intel Iris Pro 1536 MB
And lastly, Pepe: plush

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Vassilis Legakis, Sr. Software Engineer, “this is my Athens office in plain warm wood. Apart from a laptop and screen we can see my vintage (first logo) Netdata mug for coffee and an anti stress Ukulele But above all I’m proud for my IBM Model M 1986 keyboard which dominates the photo! This is something like a legend for keyboard purists”

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Here’s what Vladimir Kobal, a Software Engineer on the team is working with:
"My main computer:
X570 AORUS MASTER
AMD Ryzen 9 3950X
32 GB RAM
Samsung 970 EVO Plus 2 TB
GeForce RTX 2080 8G AORUS XTREME
Windows 10

For testing:
Mac Mini, i7, 16 GB, SSD 150 GB
Asus UN68U, i7, 32 GB, Samsung EVO 512 GB, VMWare ESXi
Raspberry Pi 3B+

Laptop:
Lenovo Yoga 920"

Happy Sysadmin Day!

Another Netdata workstation for Sysadmin Day from @joel who heads up educational and technical resources, documentation, and more!

"My system for everything from writing docs to playing games, with a Ryzen 1600, 32GB of RAM, a Radeon 5600 XT, and a few TB of disk space. On the desk is a Artic Blue mic, Steelseries Arctis 7 wireless headphones, some random RGB-y Logitech peripherals, and the lovely LG 27GL850-B as my monitor. Running Fedora 32 and Gnome 3.36.

My wannabe SRE home server! A Raspberry Pi 4 in a Canakit case connected to the router via Ethernet. Attached to the Pi is a 1B external drive I used for local rsync backups. The Pi runs Pi-hole for the whole network, and, naturally, is also running Netdata."

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@Saruspete have they used your office setup in any Sci-Fi movies lately?

Another great homelab by @James-Mills, a Senior SRE at Netdata. Here’s the full details from James:

Here is my “Rack Cabinet” / “Server Room”. This is a 22 RU 19" Rack Cabinet with 3x Supermicro 1RU servers with single socket Intel Xeon 3.4Ghz 32GB DDR4 RAM and 2x Samsung EVO 560(s) ea. These all run Proxmox VE Hypervisor and dozens of VMs that make up my Home infrastructure.

The larger server is a 4RU Supermicro with 10 3.5" Drive bays and 4 2.5" bays. The 3.5" bays are fully populated for a ZFS RAID-Z2 storage array of ~22TB.

At the top if a fully managed 24-port Gbpg switch where (yes) most of the cables that run into the wall are actually used throughout my home.

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/thread

@zack I can hear the lovely clicks of that keyboard from there ! These lethal weapons will go through time unharmed,
Very nice desk !

More great workspace(s) from the team, here’s @Austin-Hemmelgarn on the SRE/DevOps team at Netdata:

“The first of four. This is my desk when I’m not at work (at work for me is just using my laptop in a different room), including my QHD monitor, Swiftpoint Z gaming mouse, Logitech Wave wireless keyboard (soon to be replaced), a home-made LCD desk clock (just below the monitor), and a Galilean thermometer (right side of the monitor, partially obscured by it in this picture.”

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“Second of four, including my virtualization host system (the big mini-fridge sized thing), sporting a Ryzen 9 3950X CPU, 64 GB of DDR4-2666 RAM, 2 1TB NVMe SSDs and 2 500GB SATA3 SSDs, running Gentoo and currently hosting a total of 30 VMs I use for cross-distro testing. On top is the fourth generation Mac Mini that I use for testing stuff on macOS, the second generation Thinkpad X1 Extreme that I use as my primary system for work as well as for gaming, and the Turtle Beach Elite Atlas Areo wireless headset I use most of the time when gaming or in video calls.”

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“Third of four, my new custom-built NAS system with a Ryzen 3 3200G CPU, 16GB of DDR4-2666 RAM, 2 1TB SATA3 SSDs and 4 4TB SATA3 HDDs, running Alpine Linux with most of the services managed through Docker Compose. On top is one of the 802.11ax wireless mesh routers I use for WiFi, which is currently also being used as a wireless bridge for it. Located in one corner of my house because I’m planning to get an ATSC tuner card for it and make use of the live TV and PVR functionality of Plex, and this happens to be the best place in the house for OTA reception.”

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“And the last of four, the system I use for CUDA/OpenCL testing, as well as for running BOINC workunits, with a Ryzen 7 1700 CPU, 32GB of DDR4-2666 RAM, 2 120GB SATA3 SSDs, and three NVIDIA GeForce GT 1030 GPUs, running Gentoo. This one is located in a part of the house where the rather high thermal load isn’t an issue for the HVAC system to deal with, as well as being right near my main router so it can use a wired Ethernet connection.”

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I can use this thread as an excuse to get a second monitor…

The only part of my setup that is really interesting is a keyboard tray I built a few years ago.

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Not a real butcher block, but a thinner panel with epoxy top and a rubberized underside. Mounted to desk using industrial drawer hardware and metal brackets.

Also pictured, a '93 IBM (Lexmark) Model M.

@Saruspete wow, awesome setup! Thank you for sharing and all your contributions to Netdata!

@Saruspete wow - i think you win!

Greetings to all netdata contributors, staffers, users and fellow sysadmins,

Let’s join the party !

At home:
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My desk at the office:
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One of my lab at the office:
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I can tell without any doubt: netdata is by far the best monitoring tool available.
It’s one of the very few silver bullet we have in the IT, so let’s show its true power, so people can give it a try and adopt it too !

Cheers,
Adrien.

Today for our IT Heroes and Homelabs giveaway, we’re sharing a workstation today from Andrew Maguire, Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Netdata. This is a Xps13 2 in 1 Laptop.

As he describes it: “Very happy with my new slimmed-down desk - even more space for my kids to invade! I also even tried my hand at some cable management :)”

To learn more about entering the giveaway, check out our blog post.

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