Like every year, we had our local Linux conference. It was very intense event (for first year I'm involved in real organization) and I can say it's all just a big blurb.
I had two tutorials, one about my Virtual LDAP and another one about creating Google like (horizontally scalable) cluster from library building. In this one, I covered a whole bunch of tools which I ended up using during last year:
- Webconverger is the easiest way to deploy Firefox on kiosks for public Internet access
- PXElator - full stack solution to network booting and spawning machines
- Sack - horizontally scalable (across cores or nodes) in-memory perl hash with remote code execution (close to data)
- mongoDB which I use for audit log in PXElator and feed it back to Sack after finding CouchDB too slow.
- Sysadmin Cookbook as a way to document HOWTO or SOP documents
- bak-git for tracking configuration changes
- Gearman and Narada didn't get all attention they deserved, partly because i wasn't able to make Narada work (I tried perl and php version in preparation for tutorial). But, I hope that I managed to transfer part of my fascination with distributed fork approach.
During the conference I wrote small project to index git log messages using Sphinx which might help you to get started with it.