Today's class was "Beyond Shell Scripts: 21st Century Automation Tools and Techniques", taught by Aeleen Frisch.

I chose this class primarily for its introduction to cfengine, which we may use at work one of these days.

I've taken classes from Aeleen before at other conferences and enjoy her light presentation style, although she can be a bit disorganized at times. As usual, we fell behind during the day and had to speed through the final topics.

Topics:

• System Cloning - Coverage of various vendor utilities (jumpstart, kickstart) and other tools like ghost. Did a warmup exercise to build a simple kickstart config file.
• cfengine - This was the meat of the class. We covered the theory behind cfengine and discussed the use of the various cfengine terms, "configuration", "policy", etc. The built-in classes were a little hard to understand by a few people. We built a simple cfagent.conf file to perform some basic functions.

  The review of the basic actions (tidy, disable, processes, copy, files, shellcommands) was excellent and I came away with a decent understanding of what you could do with cfengine. The devil is, of course, in the details, and you'll need a fairly solid understanding of your environment and your goals to make cfengine useful and non-vexing. I see it replacing numerous 'standard' scripts that we use to remove setuid bits or disable services on our hosts. link

• expect - Simple review of an expect conversation. link
• amanda - Not many users of amanda in our class, covered lightly. link
• RRDTool - In-depth coverage of how the details get shoved in to rrdtool and used with graphs, but nothing really on the theory of how the round-robin database actually works or why it is such a neat idea. link
• Nagios - Exhaustive/exhausting coverage of nagios which descended into a combined nagios-lovefest and Q&A session. link
• stem - Covered at the very end of class. Aeleen uses stem to manage jobs that run on various machines and have interdependencies. It's some sort of message-passing tool, and useful in her batch job/computational environment. I can't fathom how it would be useful to me on a webserver.