About the ISGTC

The ISG Toolchest (ISGTC) is two things: a policy about how system administration scripts should be written and a set of scripts that follow this policy.

Why?

Scripts are often developed as a means to automate specific system administration tasks. The automation improves the efficiency of the workers and the reliability of the administrated systems.

These scripts are useful because they are powerful. If I can delete 100 expired accounts just by running a single command it is for me very useful since I won't have to manually delete each of them individually, but it also can become a disaster if I delete the wrong accounts.

Because they are powerful it is very important that they have a consistent usage interface. I am for example used to run my scripts with the '-n' option for 'no-action' so that I can first see what they would do without actually doing any change on the system. If I once use a script with the '-n' option but the scripts interprets that option differently, then it might start for example to delete accounts without me wanting to.

Usage consistency is just one of many aspects that should be particularly cared for in administration scripts. Because of that we did write a policy that contains explicit rules, which all our administration scripts are required to follow.