Lightweight inventory management with Pallet Jack

Presented by Karl-Johan Karlsson
Monday 11:10 a.m.–11:20 a.m.
Target audience: Developer

Abstract

Inventory management for systems administrators is crucial for day-to-day operations. When installing a new machine, its MAC address needs to be registered with the DHCP server. While it runs, the configuration management system needs to know what role it has so it can install the correct software. When it breaks, you need to know which rack and switch port to find it in, its serial number and when its service contract expires.

We present Pallet Jack, a systems administrator-friendly inventory database.

Its back-end store consists of a directory tree with YAML fragments, which means you can insert, version and extract information using standard text processing tools. Inheritance and automatic text processing eliminates the need to store duplicated information. Finally, a simple but powerful Ruby library helps with generating configuration files from the database.

Presented by

Karl-Johan Karlsson

Karl-Johan has been a Linux systems administrator for twenty years, but still finds new and exciting ways for systems to break. Having installed systems in South Africa, he now makes sure to include pest control when writing site requirements. He currently builds flight simulators for a company that doesn't agree with him that everything should run bleeding edge Gentoo.

For relaxation, he flies light aircraft with as few computers in them as possible.

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