[jrmenon]

I have done a lot of scripts/tools to mostly automate or simplify it for non-techs to take over, but probably the one that I am most proud of was a 'mailbox reaper' task that was fully automated by crawling the filesystem in a Netapp storage engine (NAS).

A prior version was a simple python script that ran as a cronjob but it needed lot of hand-holding as it would run at times when the filer was too heavy, and it was annoying to babysit it all the time esp. at odd hours.

The new version used snmp data from the filer to 'gauge' how idle or busy it was (as a feedback loop), and it would self-throttle or 'accelerate' itself in various stages as necessary. Saved the company a lot of grief in storage costs, and it ran like a charm with with hardly human intervention. It kept various stats and logs which could be queried as needed. Also saved a lot of time for other engineers/ops on-call team to focus on other areas.

Looking back at it, it used some crude mathematical models to gauge the busyness of the filer, but this portion was designed to be plugable and independent of how the filesystem was being crawled.

This simple program (set up as a forever loop daemon) got me thinking on autonomous agents and 'self-healing' software in general but never had time to pursue it in a more academic setting.