Introduction

The scope of the system administrator role has changed dramatically over the years. The number of systems supported by a single engineer has also increased. As such, it is impractical to handcraft each installation, and there is a need to automate as many tasks as possible. The structure of systems varies from organization to organization, therefore system administrators must be able to create their own management tools. Historically, the most popular programming languages for these tasks were UNIX shell and Perl. They served their purpose well, and I doubt they will ever cease to exist. However, the complexity of current systems requires new tools, and the Python programming language is one of them.

Python is an object oriented programming ...

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