Announcing Func! Systems management is fun again!

[Michael DeHaan]

Hi folks,

Recently a lot of us have been working on a project called Func, which 
could be interesting to a lot of admins and developers on this list.

Func is like multi-system SSH, except much more flexible.   It is highly 
scriptable on both ends (using Python), can address multiple systems 
using wildcards, and has it's own
extremely easy to deploy PKI infrastructure that integrates very easily 
with kickstarts and boot servers like Cobbler 
(http://cobbler.et.redhat.com).    Provisioning/deployment is painless, 
and scripting capability is pretty much unlimited.

https://hosted.fedoraproject.org/projects/func/

As the Wiki says, Func comes with a lot of modules for doing basic 
systems management tasks, as well as calling commands as you would with 
SSH.  There are also some rather slick modules for calling nagios 
plugins without needing Nagios installed.   There's also some example 
scripts that do hardware probing (exploding laptop finders and dead 
drive detectors!) written in the Func API, as well as a neat program 
called "func-inventory" that tracks changes to all your systems, keeping 
differences in git so you can easily see what changed.   What you can do 
with it is pretty much infinitely expandable and it is ridiculously easy 
to drop in new modules to the modules directories and extend func to do 
new things that are specific to your environment.

We're primarily targetted for Fedora, RHEL, and CentOS, but we are just 
as interested in running elsewhere -- and source checkouts/tarballs 
should run in other places as well.
If folks are interested in packaging func for other distros, we'd be all 
over that :)    I believe we're already running on a few Debian/Gentoo 
based environments.

We're interested in gathering users as well as developers -- so if you 
write an interesting func module, or a interesting script using func, 
let us know, we'll include it, and the power of Func can grow even 
further.   That's really where the power of the community is at ... 
building a lot of neat tools/scripts/modules around a very very simple 
platform.
There is not a lot of overhead required to understand Func, and even if 
you don't know a lot of Python (or just want to learn), Func is a great 
way to get started.

If this sounds like something you'd be interested in using and or 
contributing to, check out 
https://hosted.fedoraproject.org/projects/func/ ... we also have a 
mailing list (see Wiki for details) and are online at #func on 
irc.freenode.net.   Questions, comments, ideas (and of course patches!), 
are always welcome.

Thanks!  

--Michael