Manual Configuration

Obviously the amount of variety between machines depends on the type of installation; an academic Computer Science environment tends to have a larger variety of software and configurations than a site concerned primarily with a single application. Our current LCFG system supports over 2000 parameters, about 25% of which routinely vary between different systems. For individual machines, or a small site, these parameters would traditionally be configured manually, and most distributions include graphical tools to make this process more straightforward (for example [9,17]). However, large installations require more sophisticated techniques: