Tony Williams, University of New South Wales
As support and sysadmin staff we seem to spend far too much time looking at a shell prompt. There are better ways. An interactive programming language closely coupled to the shell and the system provides a better tool.
In this presentation I’ll show how the features of IPython make it an ideal tool for system administration tasks.
Topics covered wil include:
- Why IPython?
- Installing IPython
- Talking to Active Directory and Open Directory
- Parsing log files
- Reading and writing plist preference files
- Gathering system information
Tony is currently a Computer Support Officer at the School of Computer Science & Engineering at UNSW Australia. He has previously been an IT Manager, programmer, sysadmin and Desktop Support Officer, working at a number of Australian Universities. He was also Associate Editor at Australian Macworld.
His current duties vary from resetting passwords to babysitting School servers. His current projects include shifting users and their e-mail from School servers to the University’s Exchange system using a number of Python scripts and developing a number of tools to interrogate the University’s Active Directory using bash scripts and Python.