Too Hot in the Machine Room? Try Chef.

Every great system administrator maintains a bag of tricks: the Perl script to obliterate a user’s account on every system; the Bash script to setup a new server in minutes instead of hours; the Python script to alert a naughty user that has exceeded her print quota. Indeed, the vast array of languages and techniques used to keep machines up and running is astounding to behold. (Witness the diversity on Github alone.)

But as systems get bigger and proliferate in number, using random scripts becomes problematic. “Wait, did I run that script on sy001-04? Or sy004-01? And which system is next?” That’s where new projects like Chef come in.