vxp has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:
My next project is an "auto administrator" of sorts, a script that'll automate a lot of daily duties, routine work.
Since I'll release it here... give me some feature requests on what you'd like to see in it. As of right now I got these ideas:
1. Config file, with all kinds of settings in it
2. Ability to exec commands on servers other than the one this script will be running on
3. Extensive logging
4. A built-in health checker, that checks for various services on various servers. (such as www, mysql, etc)
Don't be shy. Give me feature requests. :)
Re: Auto-Admin
by ducky (Scribe) on Aug 23, 2002 at 16:30 UTC
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An absolutely admirable project! ++ just for the intention to write something for fellow admins.
However, I would like to point out cfengine a similar product to your description. Definately not perl, but an extremely powerful admin tool.
As for features... (/me breaks out the <ul> tag)
- Abstract enough config that I don't need a separate config for every host
- An easy way to add hosts to said config
- Smart enough config to do something on one platform and something else for another
- Method of running arbitrary commands/scripts on every host or a group of hosts. Need not be simultaneously, just needs to happen - think: patching or an emergency halt of a service (like stop all httpds)
Ok, wasn't that much, but enough for now. =P If you really want hear my ideas on managing 1000s of hosts with minimal staff (20-30), we can talk later. I'm actually a developer (in a group of about 4) for the unix admin environment where I work. We've got roughly 2000 hosts all managed by about 30 or so more admins.
-Ducky
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Re: Auto-Admin
by valdez (Monsignor) on Aug 23, 2002 at 14:42 UTC
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What do you think about checking also load average, disk
space and free memory? In a past work I also checked raid
status using /proc filesystem.
It is a nice idea, but search on Freshmeat
for something already done; iirc there are two perl projects
on ISP administration.
Happy coding! Valerio
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Big Brother (the health checker from a reply above) does that. :)
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Re: Auto-Admin
by metadatum (Scribe) on Aug 23, 2002 at 14:04 UTC
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Well, there are many packages that can handle #4 Health Checker -- i.e. monitoring. I have used Big Brother (www.bb4.com) in the past, and even extended it with custom scripts.
There are quite a few modules on CPAN for #1 Config file and #3 Extensive Logging.
and Net::SSH could most likely be used for #3. | [reply] |
Re: Auto-Admin
by metadatum (Scribe) on Aug 23, 2002 at 13:52 UTC
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Which platform are you targeting? Win32, Unix or both? | [reply] |
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This will be running on Linux, and will be administrating about 20 Linux servers.
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Re: Auto-Admin
by JaWi (Hermit) on Aug 24, 2002 at 15:44 UTC
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Your project sounds a lot like doing SNMP+some additional functionality. You probably want to check out the latest net-snmp sources, which has Perl bindings for all of its libraries. I've played around with them -> very cool stuff!
I'm seriously interested in the progress of this project as I tend to be a bit lazy and want to let my computer do the stuff, so this project would be great for a person such as me :-)
Greets,
-- JaWi
"A chicken is an egg's way of producing more eggs." | [reply] |
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