DevOps (a portmanteau of development and operations) is a software development method that stresses communication, collaboration and integration between software developers and information technology (IT) professionals.
If you aren't yet using Puppet or Chef for managing your *nix infrastructure, you should seriously consider it. The benefits are enormous. Frankly, I don't think you __can__ manage a modern infrastructure without using Puppet, Chef, or reinventing a configuration management framework with your own custom scripts. However, you can't use both Chef and Puppet together, so which should you choose?
Blueprint reverse engineers servers Easy configuration management. Detect relevant packages, files, and source installs. Generate reusable server configs. Convert blueprints to Puppet or Chef. No DSLs, no extra servers, no workflow changes. Blueprint looks inside popular package managers, finds changes you made to configuration files, and archives software you built from source. It runs on Debian and RPM based distros with Python >= 2.6.
Enabling HTTP Strict Transport Security on debian servers - I just enabled HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) markers on a bunch of web servers that offer HTTPS. It's an easy step to take, and it means that users of HSTS-compliant browsers (such as Chromium and the upcoming Firefox 4) or browsers with HSTS-compliant extensions (like Firefox's NoScript or HTTPS-Everywhere) will no longer be vulnerable to attacks like sslstrip once they have made one successful connection to the HSTS-enabled HTTPS web site.
etckeeper is a collection of tools to let /etc be stored in a git, mercurial, darcs, or bzr repository. It hooks into apt (and other package managers) to automatically commit changes made to /etc during package upgrades. It tracks file metadata that revison control systems do not normally support, but that is important for /etc, such as the permissions of /etc/shadow. It's quite modular and configurable, while also being simple to use if you understand the basics of working with revision control.
