First, of all, happy sysadmin day 2009-07-31! So, it seems logical that I'm announcing by project PXElator which aims to replace me with a perl script. It's basically my take on cloud hype. Currently it supports bringing up machines (virtual or physical) from boot onwards. It implements bootp, dhcp, tftp and http server to enable single action boot of new machine.
It all started when I watched Practical Puppet: Systems Building Systems and decided that real power is in expressing system administration as code. I also liked DSL approach which Puppet took in ruby and tried to apply same principle (declarative DSL) in perl. If you take a look at source code it seems work work quite well.
In the spirit of release early, release often this code will be in flux until end of this summer, when I plan to deploy it to create web kiosk environment for browsing our library catalog based on it.
