In addition to our buildbot automation hacks, we spent a fair amount of time twiddling our buildbot configuration for the PyCon project. I wrote up some of the configuration file stuff last night. If you're interested in a private "force build" status page, locking master & slave resources, driving builds from svn checkin, or using the @reboot crontab extension to start buildbot on boot, you might be interested in reading it.
More dnspython
I sent the little dns_check module on to Bob Halley, the author of dnspython, and he sent me back a couple of patches for the code. Good stuff. All checked-in and documented now.
Sysadmin tools
This slashdot article infuriated me more than the usual half-troll slashdot article. An MP3 player and a terminal program are sysadmin tools? Bah.
Here are a few of my favorites.
- screen -- run
multiple programs in a single terminal window, flip between the
output, detach and re-attach. Life is good. My all-time favorite;
I've been using it ever since Mark Galassi introduced me to it back in
the late 80s/early 90s.
- VNC -- like screen, but for
X11 programs. Bonus: VNC to
Flash recorder for screencasting, although that's not really a
sysadmin application.
- bash 'for' loops at the command line. Silly, I know, but combined with 'cut', 'sort',
'uniq', 'tail', and 'head', I can do tons of things in one long complicated line. I don't actually
know how to program in bash beyond this -- I use Python for anything more
complicated.
- 'find'. Its command line options have gotta be nearly Turing complete. Powerful
beyond belief.
- supervisor. It's hard to explain how happy I was when I found this Python-based system for starting and
restarting persistent processes...
- twill. Really.
Having a command-line tool to script Web site aliveness tests & (now) DNS
checks is pretty handy. I'll probably add some ping-is-the-machine-alive
code, too.
I'm sure there's more that I'll remember as soon as I post this.
--titus