Check out the new USENIX Web site.

USENIX Home . About USENIX . Events . membership . Publications . Students
19th Large Installation System Administration Conference—Abstract

Pp. 31–37 of the Proceedings

Configuration Tools: Working Together

Paul Anderson and Edmund Smith, University of Edinburgh

Abstract

Since the LISA conferences began, the character of a typical "large installation" has changed greatly. Most large sites tended to consist of a comparatively small number of hand-crafted "servers" supporting a larger number of very similar "clients" (which would usually be configured with the aid of some automatic tool). A modern large site involves a more complex mesh of services, often with demanding requirements for completely automatic reconfiguration of entire services to provide fault-tolerance. As these changes have happened however, the tools available to provide configuration management for a site have not evolved to keep pace with these new challenges. This paper looks at some of the reasons why configuration tools have failed to move forward, and presents some suggestions for enabling the state of the art to advance.
  • View the full text of this paper in HTML and PDF.
    Click here if you have forgotten your password Until December 2006, you will need your USENIX membership identification in order to access the full papers. The Proceedings are published as a collective work, © 2005 by the USENIX Association. All Rights Reserved. Rights to individual papers remain with the author or the author's employer. Permission is granted for the noncommercial reproduction of the complete work for educational or research purposes. USENIX acknowledges all trademarks within this paper.

  • If you need the latest Adobe Acrobat Reader, you can download it from Adobe's site.
To become a USENIX Member, please see our Membership Information.

?Need help? Use our Contacts page.

Last changed: 8 Dec. 2005 rc
Technical Program
LISA '05 Home
USENIX home