Introducing the Host Factory computer configuration management system

GatorLUG Meeting Agenda for October 15, 2014

6:00 - 6:20 Announcements / General Discussion

6:20 - 7:40 Introducing the Host Factory computer configuration management system | Brian Bartholomew

Have your machines been broken into? How do you know? How would you repair?

The Host Factory computer configuration management system is the system administration automation I've always wanted. It has features that are a union of: cfengine/puppet, mercurial, backups, mysql, rdist/rsync, apt-get, tripwire, and live cd.

When the shellshock bash bug was announced I knew my web server had not been broken into, because I regularly check every file on it with Host Factory. It takes less than five minutes to check 9 Gigabytes across 440K total files and dirs, from Gainesville Hackerspace to Linode in Atlanta.

Brian Bartholomew has been a Unix system administrator for 25 years. Half his work experience has been in the commercial world in Boston, and half at the University of Florida. In Boston he supported financial trading floors for mutual fund firms and banks; at UF he supported two departments of mathematicians and the PeopleSoft enterprise accounting system. His career speciality in version control of running Unix systems started in 1990 with rdist.

7:40 - 8:00pm Open discussion, meet and greet someone new