SysAdmins are Crap
I've published one solution on this site (the JobMonitor application), but that is only one facet of SysAdmin automation. Another project I've worked on is what I affectionately call "the Automator". It was written for a specific employer, so I don't know if I'll ever be able to give it the light of day, but it's basically a web-based console that allows for automating ssh commands across multiple servers. Sounds scary? Well, it's logging in as a non-privileged user with a private key that is password-protected. It can optionally su to root and run commands like that. It then puts the output into a database and optionally can integrate with the JobMonitor application to error check that output. There's also a scheduling system built into it so you can schedule up commands to be run across various servers using a syntax similar to cron.
It's been used to run over 700,000 commands in 8 months on over 300 servers. Would love to be able to open source it someday...
