Python for DevOps

Chapter 4. Useful Linux Utilities

The command line and its tooling were one of the main reasons Alfredo felt attached to Linux servers when he started his career. One of his first jobs as a system administrator in a medium-sized company involved taking care of everything that was Linux-related. The small IT department was focused on the Windows servers and desktops, and they thoroughly disliked using the command line. At one point, the IT manager told him that he understood graphical user interfaces (GUIs), installing utilities, and tooling in general to solve problems: “I am not a coder, if it doesn’t exist as a GUI, I can’t use it,” he said.

Alfredo was hired as a contractor to help out with the few Linux servers the company had. At the time, Subversion (SVN) was all the rage for version control, and the developers depended on this single SVN server to push their work. Instead of using the centralized identity server, provided by two domain controllers, it used a text-based authentication system that mapped a user to a hash representing the password. This meant that usernames didn’t necessarily map to those in the domain controller and that passwords could be anything. Often, a developer would ask to reset the password, and someone had to edit this text file with the hash. A project manager asked Alfredo to integrate the SVN authentication with the domain controller (Microsoft’s Active Directory). The first question he asked was why hadn’t the IT department done this already? ...