High-level system configuration

The high rate of requirement changes make system administration a complex task. This complexity is further influenced by the increasing scale, unpredictable behaviour of software and diversity in terms of hardware and software. In order to deal with this complexity, system configuration tools have been proposed. The processes that many system configuration tools advocate are kept close to manual system administration. We feel that this approach has failed to address the complexity of system administration in the real world. In this paper, we advocate a higher-level language for system configuration, prototyped in PoDIM. We introduce the use of constraints, dependency modeling and platform independence in the context of system configuration. We believe that high-level languages are needed to reduce system administration complexity. PoDIM is one step in that direction.

[1]  Paul Anderson,et al.  LCFG: The Next Generation , 2002 .

[2]  Daniel Jackson,et al.  Alloy: a lightweight object modelling notation , 2002, TSEM.

[3]  David A. Patterson,et al.  A Simple Way to Estimate the Cost of Downtime , 2002, LISA.

[4]  Susan Coghlan,et al.  A Case Study in Configuration Management Tool Deployment , 2005, LISA.

[5]  Daniel Jackson,et al.  Software Abstractions - Logic, Language, and Analysis , 2006 .

[6]  Paul Anderson,et al.  Large Scale Linux Configuration with LCFG , 2000, Annual Linux Showcase & Conference.

[7]  Nicodemos Constantinou Damianou,et al.  A policy framework for management of distributed systems , 2002 .

[8]  Narayan Desai,et al.  System Management Methodologies with Bcfg2 , 2006, login Usenix Mag..

[9]  Bob Moore.  Policy Core Information Model (PCIM) Extensions , 2003, RFC.

[10]  Wouter Joosen,et al.  PoDIM: A Language for High-Level Configuration Management , 2007, LISA.

[11]  Mark Burgess,et al.  A Site Configuration Engine , 1995, Comput. Syst..

[12]  Rémy Evard,et al.  An Analysis of UNIX System Configuration , 1997, LISA.

[13]  Sanjai Narain,et al.  Network Configuration Management via Model Finding , 2005, LISA.

[14]  Luke Kanies.  Puppet: Next-Generation Configuration Management , 2006, login Usenix Mag..

[15]  Alva L. Couch,et al.  What Is This Thing Called System Configuration? , 2004, LISA.

[16]  Wouter Joosen,et al.  Managing Real-World System Configurations with Constraints , 2008, Seventh International Conference on Networking (icn 2008).