If you do systems administration work of any kind, you have to deal with the growing complexity of your environment and increasing demands on your time. Automating System Administration with Perl, Second Edition, not only offers you the right tools for your job, but also suggests the best way to approach specific problems and to securely automate recurring tasks. Updated and expanded to cover the latest operating systems, technologies, and Perl modules, this edition of the "Otter Book" will help you: Manage user accounts Monitor filesystems and processes Work with configuration files in important formats such as XML and YAML Administer databases, including MySQL, MS-SQL, and Oracle with DBI Work with directory services like LDAP and Active Directory Script email protocols and spam control Effectively create, handle, and analyze log files Administer network name and configuration services, including NIS, DNS and DHCP Maintain, monitor, and map network services, using technologies and tools such as SNMP, nmap, libpcap, GraphViz and RRDtool Improve filesystem, process, and network security This edition includes additional appendixes to get you up to speed on technologies such as XML/XPath, LDAP, SNMP, and SQL. With this book in hand and Perl in your toolbox, you can do more with less -- fewer resources, less effort, and far less hassle.

Some people plan to become administrators. The rest of us are thrust into it: we are webmasters, hobbyists, or just the default "technical people" on staff who are expected to keep things running. After some stumbling around repeating the same steps over and over again (and occasionally paying the price when we forget one), we realize that we must automate these tasks, or suffer endless frustration. Thus enters Perl.The Perl programming language is ideal for writing quick yet powerful scripts that automate many administrative tasks. It's modular, it's powerful, and it's perfect for managing systems and services on many platforms.Perl for System Administration is designed for all levels of administrators--from hobbyists to card-carrying SAGE members--sysadmins on multi-platform sites. Written for several different platforms (Unix, Windows NT, and Mac OS), it's a guide to the pockets of administration where Perl can be most useful for sites large and small, including: Filesystem management User administration with a dash of XML DNS and other network name services Database administration using DBI and ODBC Directory services and frameworks like LDAP and ADSI Using email for system administration Working with log files of all kinds Each chapter concentrates on a single administrative area, discusses the possible pitfalls, and then shows how Perl comes to the rescue. Along the way we encounter interesting Perl features and tricks, with many extended examples and complete programs. The scripts included in the book can simply be used as written or with minimal adaptation. But it's likely that readers will also get a taste of what Perl can do, and start extending those scripts for tasks that we haven't dreamed of.Perl for System Adminstration doesn't attempt to teach the Perl language, but it is an excellent introduction to the power and flexibility of Perl, and it whets the appetite to learn more. It's for anyone who needs to use Perl for system administration and needs to hit the ground running.

The author focuses solely on how UNIX and Linux system administrators can use well-known tools to automate tasks, even across multiple systems.

"SQL Server Administration with Perl" consists of a series of scenarios covering a wide range of SQL Server administrative topics. These are real-world scenarios that you hear DBAs discussing on the SQL Server forums and newsgroups-scenarios that DBAs run into in their day-to-day development or production environments. Readers will walk away from this book with two things: a DBA toolkit with well over 150 Perl scripts and problem-solving techniques they can apply to create even more tools for attacking other SQL Server administrative problems.

A text focusing on the methods and alternatives for designed TCP/IP-based client/server systems and advanced techniques for specialized applications with Perl. A guide examining a collection of the best third party modules in the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network. Topics covered: Perl function libraries and techniques that allow programs to interact with resources over a network. IO: Socket library ; Net: FTP library -- Telnet library -- SMTP library ; Chat problems ; Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) issues ; Markup-language parsing ; Internet Protocol (IP) broadcasting and multicasting.

Python is an ideal language for solving problems, especially in Linux and Unix networks. With this pragmatic book, administrators can review various tasks that often occur in the management of these systems, and learn how Python can provide a more efficient and less painful way to handle them. Each chapter in Python for Unix and Linux System Administration presents a particular administrative issue, such as concurrency or data backup, and presents Python solutions through hands-on examples. Once you finish this book, you'll be able to develop your own set of command-line utilities with Python to tackle a wide range of problems. Discover how this language can help you: Read text files and extract information Run tasks concurrently using the threading and forking options Get information from one process to another using network facilities Create clickable GUIs to handle large and complex utilities Monitor large clusters of machines by interacting with SNMP programmatically Master the IPython Interactive Python shell to replace or augment Bash, Korn, or Z-Shell Integrate Cloud Computing into your infrastructure, and learn to write a Google App Engine Application Solve unique data backup challenges with customized scripts Interact with MySQL, SQLite, Oracle, Postgres, Django ORM, and SQLAlchemy With this book, you'll learn how to package and deploy your Python applications and libraries, and write code that runs equally well on multiple Unix platforms. You'll also learn about several Python-related technologies that will make your life much easier.

Many programmers would love to use Perl for projects that involve heavy lifting, but miss the many traditional algorithms that textbooks teach for other languages. Computer scientists have identified many techniques that a wide range of programs need, such as: Fuzzy pattern matching for text (identify misspellings!) Finding correlations in data Game-playing algorithms Predicting phenomena such as Web traffic Polynomial and spline fitting Using algorithms explained in this book, you too can carry out traditional programming tasks in a high-powered, efficient, easy-to-maintain manner with Perl.This book assumes a basic understanding of Perl syntax and functions, but not necessarily any background in computer science. The authors explain in a readable fashion the reasons for using various classic programming techniques, the kind of applications that use them, and -- most important -- how to code these algorithms in Perl.If you are an amateur programmer, this book will fill you in on the essential algorithms you need to solve problems like an expert. If you have already learned algorithms in other languages, you will be surprised at how much different (and often easier) it is to implement them in Perl. And yes, the book even has the obligatory fractal display program.There have been dozens of books on programming algorithms, some of them excellent, but never before has there been one that uses Perl.The authors include the editor of The Perl Journal and master librarian of CPAN; all are contributors to CPAN and have archived much of the code in this book there."This book was so exciting I lost sleep reading it." Tom Christiansen