SLUG rocks Puppet, Flex and Bison
July’s SLUG meeting was once again awesome with SLUG President Lindsay Holmwood giving an introduction to Puppet, a tool for automating system administration tasks on a variety of Unix-like platforms. Erik de Castro Lopo also gave an introductory talk on Flex and Bison, two commonly used free software tools for parser generation.
I don’t do much system administration if I can help it, and Puppet seems to be the perfect tool for people who would rather be doing something else. Last week saw me reverse engineering one of the build servers at work so that I could get nightly builds running on a test box. This would hopefully allow me to avoid the murderous rage of the rest of the development team caused by my build system “improvements” breaking the build.
While hunting down the exotic combination of environment variables that allowed everything to work, it occurred to me that there are probably lots of servers that nobody really understands the configuration of- and that nobody really cares about either, until a random piece of hardware fails and chaos ensues. In short, if you don’t want this sort of hilarity on your network, get Puppet. Lindsay’s brief introduction made it seem like an elegant solution to a very messy problem.
Erik’s talk on Flex and Bison was very timely as I need a new data file format for one of my personal projects. These files will usually be written by hand and read by a program, so using Flex and Bison to create a parser makes sense. I downloaded Erik’s sample code and together with this tutorial it wasn’t difficult to get a basic parser working.
Learning about new tools is always a good idea, and SLUG meetings are an easy way to do it- someone else has already made the effort to figure out how the damn thing works. I’m often stumbling across code that makes me think: “Why didn’t you just use library x or standard module y rather than write this?”, and I try to avoid creating those moments for other programmers. It’s difficult because you need to know what’s already out there, and out there is really, really big.
(On Aug 5th, 2007 at 9:09 am)
Glad you enjoyed the talk.