Mike Ciavarella, Coffee Bean Software Pty Ltd
Automation is critical to surviving your system administration career with your sanity, hair, and systems intact. If you can automate some or all of a task, then you stand to make considerable gains in personal productivity, task repeatability, and system predictability.
This class is a practical crash course in how—using a combination of bash, Perl, and friends—you can write useful scripts that solve real-world system administration problems.
Please note that this is a hands-on class. A basic understanding of programming ("What's a loop?") and how to edit files in your favorite flavor of •nix are assumed. Attendees will need to bring a laptop with OS X, Linux, or FreeBSD installed to complete in-class tasks. Time in the LISA lab will also be scheduled to complement this class.
Who should attend:
Junior and intermediate sysadmins who are new to scripting or would like to create scripts to reliably automate sysadmin tasks.
Take back to work:
Understanding of common scripting patterns and techniques
Topics include:
An understanding of how to apply standard utilities in your scripts, along with recipes for automating typical administration tasks.
