IBM developerWorks: Automating UNIX system administration with Perl

[ Thanks to Kellie for this link. ]

Using perl and cfengine, this article sets out to assist in UNIX (and Linux) system administration. Includes plenty of code samples and lists a large number of areas where cfengine can assist in maintaining a system:

"Managing configuration files is tough. You can start by considering whether cfengine is adequate for the task. Unfortunately, cfengine's editing is line oriented, so complex configuration files will probably not be a good match for it. But simple files such as the TCP wrappers configuration file /etc/hosts.allow are best done through cfengine.

Usually, you will want to keep more than one version of configuration files. For instance, you may need two sets of DNS configurations in /etc/resolv.conf, one for external, and another for internal machines. The external DNS resolv.conf file could, naturally, go into a directory called "external", while the internal resolv.conf could go into the corresponding "internal" directory. Let's assume both directories are under a global "spec" directory, which is a sort of root for configuration files.

The following code will traverse the spec directory, searching for a filename suitable for a given machine. It will start at /usr/local/spec and go down, looking for files that match the one requested. Furthermore, it will check whether or not each directory's name is the same as the class belonging to some machine. Thus, if we request locate_global('resolv.conf', 'wonka'), the function will look under /usr/local/spec for files named resolv.conf that are in either the root directory, or in children of the root directory whose names match the classes that the "wonka" machine belongs to. So, if "wonka" belongs to the "chocolate" class, and if there is a /usr/local/spec/chocolate/resolv.conf file, then locate_global() will return "/usr/local/spec/chocolate/resolv.conf."

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