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The Tools Team is a critical component of any Software Development
organization. Version control, build tools, defect tracking,
document management, source browsers, debuggers, compilers. The
list seems endless.
Whether it's developing tools for in house use, or
integrating and configuring 3rd party tools, a successful Tools
person makes the developers more productive.
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I started my career as a software developer. While I have branched
out quite a bit over the years, I have always managed to do at
least a few development projects a year. This is one of the things
that sets me apart from others in the Configuration Management and
System Administrator arenas: I'm a programmer. That's a rare
combination. Many administrators can write the occaisional
20-line shell script to "automate" a process. But that's the
limit. I can look at a project through a developer's eyes,
determine what is needed and what is possible, and then implement
the solution.
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My client had a Unix environment with approximately 30 servers
and 500 clients, primarily SUN systems, with a sprinkling of
HP clients. They were against using the NFS automounter, for
reasons that are beyond the scope of this page. Managing the
*fstab files on the clients was a major problem. After some
research, I wrote a tool to manage the *fstab file on an
individual system. The tool was invoked from cron each night,
and read a master map of NFS server mount points. It then
made sure that all mount points were mounted on the client, that
no unexpected mounts were present, and that the proper network
interface was being used on a server-by-server basis. Over time,
this tool grew to be a general client management tool, collecting
data and updating clients as needed on an ongoing basis. If I were
to do this project now, I would probably just use cfengine,
but this project pre-dates cfengine.
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My client was a start-up. They contacted me 4 weeks before the first
revision of their product was scheduled to ship, because they had
no installation procedure. This was a Unix (Sun) based product that
integrated with a pre-existing Oracle database. Different people
within the company had certain knowledge about parts of the
installation, but there was no single source who had a handle on
all of the requirements. I met with everyone who had any knowledge
on the subject, then wrote a requirements document/functional spec
for the installation program. Once this was agreed upon, I wrote
the installation program, using Perl for the pre-op and post-op
scripts from the pkgadd family. Included in the installation
was the complete Oracle database table creation and initial data
upload. The installation program was available and tested one week
before the product ship date.
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