Cultured Perl: Automating UNIX System Administration with Perl
By Teodor Zlatanov2004-07-15
Summary
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The most frustrating part of UNIX system administration is the variety of ways that UNIX vendors find to evade standardization. Because of this, Perl is powerless when it stands alone against all the issues in UNIX systems. Problems like the password file syntax, sharing file systems, and tracking logs quickly become unmanageable without a tool like cfengine. Nevertheless, some hope exists; after all, we just looked at some ways in which Perl can simplify system administration.
Perl interfaces quite well with cfengine. You could use Perl to produce custom-tailored cfengine configurations, or you could run Perl scripts from cfengine. I have done both, and find the integration to be painless. Alone, however, cfengine suffers from a simplistic configuration language and lack of data structures. I will expand upon this topic in a future article on cfengine.
The centralized configuration file strategy presented in this article should prove very useful if you choose to implement it. I have been using it on my site for six months now with great success. If you check the entire hierarchy into a version control system like CVS, you will also enjoy the benefit of versioned system files that can be reverted to any state that was checked into the version control system.
Tutorial Pages:
» A Centralized Configuration File Strategy
» The Tool Cfengine
» Configuration File Management
» Task Automation
» Summary
» Resources
First published by IBM DeveloperWorks
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