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. :)

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Auto-Admin
by ducky (Scribe) on Aug 23, 2002 at 16:30 UTC

    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

    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
    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.
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Re: Auto-Admin
by metadatum (Scribe) on Aug 23, 2002 at 13:52 UTC
    Which platform are you targeting? Win32, Unix or both?
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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
    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."

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