I'm so glad to find this blog post while browsing the Iron Man planet:

   http://szabgab.com/blog/2009/04/1240827553.html

Three years ago, I wrote the smartlinks.pl script to integrate the Pugs test suite with the Perl 6 Synopses documentation. Gábor Szabó now has done an excellent job in refactoring and packaging the tool into a general-purpose CPAN module. It had been my TODO until I was caught by accumulated schoolwork :P

Enjoy his (well, also our) Text::SmartLinks module!

   http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?Text::SmartLinks

System administration is also part of my $work. Playing with a (big) bunch of  machines without a handy tool is painful. So I refactored some of our old scripts and released SSH::Batch, a collection of useful parallel ssh scripts, to CPAN:

    http://search.cpan.org/dist/SSH-Batch/

SSH::Batch allows you to name your clusters using variables and interval/set syntax in your ~/.fornodesrc config file. For instance:

    $ cat ~/.fornodesrc
    A=foo[01-03].com bar.org
    B=bar.org baz[a-b,d,e-g].cn foo02.com
    C={A} * {B}
    D={A} - {B}

where cluster C is the intersection set of cluster A and B while D is those machines in A but not in B.

And then you can query machine host list by using SSH::Batch's fornodes script:

   $ fornodes '{C}'
   bar.org
   foo02.com

   $ fornodes '{D}'
   foo01.com
   foo03.com

Furthermore, to run a command on a cluster at the concurrency level of 6:

   atnodes 'ls -lh' '{A} + {B}' my.more.com -c 6

Or upload a local file to the remote cluster:

  tonodes ~/my.tar.gz '{A} / {B}' :/tmp/

There's also a key2nodes script to push SSH public keys to remote machines ;)

A colleague in Alibaba B2B is already using it. And one of my teammates is going to use it to operate on those thousands of machines in our instance of the YST (Yahoo! Search Technology) cluster and I'm ready to receive more feedback from him ;)

Have fun :)

Last night I gave a talk to our PerlChina folks at the April meeting in the Flow Bar. Here's the slides that I used:

• Firefox XUL format: Browse in Firefox, Download tarball
• PDF format
• PPT format

The XUL format is the best among the three ;)

Just as the topic of the talk suggests, we're migrating from Firefox clusters to WebKit ones. I'll post more details here in the near future.

Enjoy!