One benefit of working in a hardware company is that you actually have hardware. I have worked in software for a long time, and I have learned to appreciate when new servers are not such a scarce resource as to impact productivity. However, hardware in our group needs to be shared amongst a large group of developers, and constantly reserved, assigned, and reprovisioned. We use an install of the booked scheduler to reserve servers. As with many tools, I am most interested in using it in a scripted fashion. Booked comes with an API. Here’s some of the things I can do with it.

My job requires me to perform operations on multiple machines. These operation can either be against the platform management server (reboot, change firmware options) or via an remote connection to the operating system running on that machine. Here’s how I manage the scripts to simplify my work.