Wild-eyed thinking aloud: Python System Management Infrastructure
François Pinard
pinard at iro.umontreal.ca
Sun Aug 5 12:49:32 EDT 2001
[Ng Pheng Siong]
> According to William Annis <annis at biostat.wisc.edu>:
> > Recently I have found myself designing a database-driven system
> > to keep track of our machines, what they do, where they sit, etc.,
> > and I keep thinking "William, you should write an *infrastructure*
> > for all this system junk you do." I'd rather not do this alone.
> This problem has been around long before the first Internet gold rush -
> many skilled people have attacked it. Find something you can get going,
> e.g., cfengine, Big Brother, even the old venerable Nocol.
About `cfengine', I tried it very seriously and for a long while, and
despite seduced by the idea, came to regret having used this package, for
its lack of maintainability. But as I became much dependent on `cfengine',
it was just not possible for me to dismiss it. So, after having sufferred
enough, I bit the bullet, and rewrote those parts I needed in Python.
What a relief! That was much, much more maintainable. It was also easy
to use Python itself as a configuration description language, and this gave
me, for free, a _lot_ of flexibility. Speed was also very acceptable: such
beasts are typically IO-bound, `cfengine' IO optimizations were not difficult
to transpose into Python. (I'm not aware of Big Brother nor Nocol.)
> Join Usenix and SAGE. Check out the material of Usenix's sysadmin
> conferences from years past. Behold the diversity. It doesn't have to
> be Python.
I quite understand your call for broader views. Yet, in my own experience,
unless you are ready to fully accept a package for what it statically is,
"being Python" helps a great deal.
--
François Pinard http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard
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