NordU2002 - The 4th NordU/USENIX Conference
February 18-22, 2002 in Helsinki, Finland

M3

Perl for System Administration - The Power and the Praxis

The instructor: Daniel Klein

Who should attend:

People with system administration duties, advanced-beginner to intermediate Perl experience, and a desire to make their jobs easier and less stressful in times of sysadmin crises.

Content:

Perl was originally created to help with system administration, so it is a wonder that there isn't more instructional material devoted to helping people use Perl for this purpose. This tutorial hopes to begin to remedy this situation by giving you six solid hours of instruction geared towards putting your existing Perl knowledge to practice in the system administration realm.

The morning section will concentrate on the power of Perl in this context. Based on David Blank-Edelman's O'Reilly book of the subject, we'll take a multi-platform look at using Perl in cutting-edge and old standby system administration domains. This jam-packed survey will include:

secure Perl scripting
dealing with files and filesystems (including source control, XML, databases, log files)
dealing with SQL databases via DBI and ODBC
email as a system administration tool (including spam analysis)
network directory services (including NIS, DNS, LDAP, ADSI)
network management (including SNMP and WBEM)

In the afternoon, we look at putting our Perl knowledge to work for us to solve time-critical system administration problems using short Perl programs. Centered on a set of "battle stories" and the Perl source code used to deal with them, we'll discuss different approaches to dealing with crises using Perl.

At the end of the day, you'll walk away from this class with Perl approaches and techniques that can help you solve your daily system administration problems. You'll have new ideas in hand for writing small Perl programs to get you out of big sysadmin pinches. And on top of all this, you are also likely to deepen your Perl knowledge.

Daniel Klein, has been teaching a wide variety of Unix-related subjects since 1984, and has been involved with Unix since 1976. His experience covers a broad range of disciplines, including the Internals of almost every Unix kernel released in the past 23 years, real-time process control, web-related systems and servers, compilers and interpreters, medical diagnostic systems, system security and administration, graphical user interface management systems, and a racetrack betting system. He contributes regularly to the proceedings and invited talks of the USENIX Association, and is also their tutorial coordinator. He holds a Masters of Applied Mathematics from Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and in his free time is a member of an a-cappella choir and an improvisational comedy troupe.

2001-11-19