Some brief software updates:

Custodian

This is the monitoring tool I wrote for Bytemark. It still rocks, and has run over 10 million tests without failure.

I'd love more outside feedback, even if just to say "documentation needs work".

Slaughter

This is my sysadmin tool for multiple hosts - consider it cfengine-lite, or cfengine-trivial more likely.

The 2.x release is finally out, and features pluggable transports. That means your central server can be running HTTP, RSYNC, FTP, or anything you like.

90% of the changes came from or were inspired by Csillag Tamas, to whom I owe a debt of thanks.

Templer

A static-site generator, written in Perl.

I use this to generate blogspam.net, and other sites from simple layouts. Tutorial available online.

redis-document-store

A trivial hack which allows using Redis as a schema-less document storage system.

Assuming you never delete documents it is simple, transparent, and already in live use for Debian Administration

Random Comment on Templer:

Although I've made extensive notes on common static site generators, and they will be discussed at length in the near future, I do want to highlight one problem common to 90% of them: Symbolic links.

For example webgen fails my simple test:

~/hg/websites$ webgen create test.example.com
~/hg/websites$ cd test.example.com/src/

~/hg/websites/test.example.com/src$ mkdir jquery-1.2.3
~/hg/websites/test.example.com/src$ touch jquery-1.2.3/jquery.js
~/hg/websites/test.example.com/src$ ln -s jquery-1.2.3 jquery

~/hg/websites/test.example.com$ webgen
Starting webgen...
...
Finished
~/hg/websites/test.example.com$ ls out/  | grep jq
jquery-1.2.3

Here we see creating a symlink to a directory has not produced a matching symlink in the output. Something I use frequently. for example.

Some tools mangled symlinked directories, or files, some ignore them completely. Neither is acceptible.

Tags: custodian, slaughter, static, templer | 2 comments