rent tool adequately solves all LISA ’04: 18th Large the Installation System Administration problems in configuration man- Conference agement, and that collaboration between researchers in the field Atlanta, Georgia and a refocusing on the principles November 14–19, 2004 behind tool design, rather than the refinement of any one tool, are conference required for future progress. SPECIAL AWARDS reports As usual, a range of polls were Doug Hughes was the recipient taken. The majority of attendees of the first Chuck Yerkes Award regard themselves as tool develop- Our hearty thanks go: for Outstanding Individual ers, but a much smaller number Contribution on Member have written tools that are also To the LISA ’04 scribe Forums, and Brent Chapman used by others. Many manage coordinator: was the recipient of the SAGE either high-performance clusters John Sechrest Outstanding Achievement or Windows machines, and well Award. over half indicated a strong inter- To the LISA ’04 est in the theoretical research summarizers: CONFERENCE SUMMARIES issues in system configuration, in Tristan Brown addition Rebecca Camus Configuration Management to practical concerns of tool development. Andrew Echols Workshop Some attendees felt that those John Hawkins Paul Anderson, University of Edinburgh within the configuration commu- Jimmy Kaplowitz nity are approaching a consensus, Summarized by John but others thought there is some Peter H. Salus Hawkins way to go yet. The problems John Sechrest This year’s configuration work- involved are only beginning to be Josh Simon shop was attended by 27 peo- specified in words whose mean- Gopalan Sivathanu ple, from a range of academic ings are agreed on, and there is and commercial organizations still much duplication of work. Josh Whitlock with often widely differing Attempts were made to define a requirements for their configu- And to the number of terms in common usage ration management tools. EuroBSDCon 2004 but with slightly ambiguous or summarizer: In the three years since the first overloaded meanings. “Policy” Jan Schaumann workshop, there has been was suggested to be a description great-er recognition that the of what a machine is intended to configuration problem extends do, including intended collabora- beyond that of configuring sin- tions as well as configurations. gle machines toward methods “Service Level Agreements” of managing collections of (SLAs) were defined as relation- nodes, often in a decentralized ships promising service within manner or by a devolved man- specific tolerances. agement team. Effort is required on the specifica- This workshop took a slightly tion of intermachine relationships. different form from previous A tool may correctly configure a ones. Each of the four sessions machine in isolation, but more followed a different theme, con- complex ways of capturing the centrating on separate areas of details of a service specification are the problem. The traditional needed to ensure that interma- presentations of attendees’ tools chine relationships hold, thus pro- were not present this time, ducing the desired service behav- helping to avoid the “tool wars” iors. of previous workshops. It is now widely agreed that no cur- ;LOGIN: FEBRUARY 2005 18TH LARGE INSTALLATION SYSTEM ADMINISTRATION CONFERENCE 69 SLAs cross a dividing line, since early to consider it in any detail attempted to increase the number they require active monitoring. since the range of requirements of of specific examples of configura- While it is essential that this moni- such systems is not yet fully tion problems tool users are actu- toring be integrated into the tool, understood. ally grappling with. Question- it should be part of a layer distinct Luke Kanies and Alva Couch naires were distributed, and from the specification language talked of the difficulty of achieving although these have yet to be ana- currently used. more widespread adoption of con- lyzed at the time of writing, the As soon as dynamic properties are figuration management tools. Bar- response was impressive, and it is introduced, much of the certainty riers to adoption include the hos- hoped that this exercise will prove that previously existed is lost, and tility of system administrators fruitful. it will no longer be possible to tell used to the current ways of work- On devolved aspect resolution, it what’s true or false at any particu- ing, the complex task of respecify- was suggested that the system lar time, thus moving into the ing the configuration of the site should follow the human process realm of probabilities. This is a under the new tool, and unhelpful of resolution. Political lines are fundamental problem that must be management attitudes not aided important and should be reflected lived with. It was suggested that by poor cost models and lack of by the machine aspect resolution. this uncertainty has at least two trust in often inadequately proven An expert system could be utilized dimensions, time and value uncer- systems. to predict the impact of the choice tainty. Alva’s presentation described how of value. The possibility of a set of stan- the cost of configuration manage- Suggestions about where research dards for configuration was dis- ment goes through four phases, should focus from this point cussed, with the POSIX standard each phase reaching a point where included the formalization and for UNIX as an analogy. The use of the cost rapidly increases and a documentation of the collective a low-level API for configuration more sophisticated approach to knowledge so far, provision of lim- was also suggested. configuration management must ited user control, description of Mark Burgess led a session on be adopted. Most sites have conflicts within configurations decentralized configuration, illus- reached the point at the end of the and procedures for their resolu- trated by Ed Smith’s simulation of second phase where the configura- tion, mechanisms for configura- a decentralized service manager tion is managed “incrementally,” tion transactions, and the identifi- capable of reconfiguring in for example with cfengine, but en- cation of a wider range of response to node failure. counters problems with hidden case-study examples with a variety preconditions requiring bare-metal of candidate tools on which to try A move away from centrally man- rebuilds. They are not aware of them. aged systems is required to cope how to make the transition to a both with problems of scale and This is likely to remain an active “proscriptive” management strat- area for some time, but there was a with vulnerability to central points egy. of failure that are becoming prob- general feeling of optimism at the lematic for large sites. However, Site managers need to know at workshop that solutions to many this move brings with it reductions what point it becomes more eco- of the problems are reachable. in predictability, trust, and relative nomical to adopt a heavyweight Sysadmin Education Workshop tool such as LCFG, with huge ini- simplicity of management. Decen- John Sechrest, PEAK Internet Services; tralized management allows tial costs in setup and staff training but more robust results in han- Curt Freeland, University of Notre autonomy where some configura- Dame tion decisions are made by the sys- dling large numbers of machines. tem by use of protocols, including The problem of loss of institu- Summarized by John Sechrest those for negotiation and service tional memory between the “incre- The system administration educa- discovery. To govern this mental” and “proscriptive” phases tion workshop addresses the autonomous behavior, the system would be alleviated if data mining process of system administration must have in place an awareness of techniques could be used to pull education at the university level. its environment that is unneces- out a large proportion of the cur- This was the seventh year of the sary under central management rent configuration and convert this workshop. Previous materials for and policy control. to configuration data for the new system administration course con- There was some discussion of per- system. There was some discus- tent were discussed and an earlier vasive computing, the manage- sion as to whether this is curriculum of how many different ment of large numbers of small intractable. courses might fit together into a devices, but this is currently an A session on case studies with degree program was reviewed. open problem and it may be too Steven Jenkins and John Hawkins 70 ;LOGIN: VOL. 30, NO. 1 A new Web site (http://education paralyzing the system administra- measure something before you can .sage.org) was unveiled as a start- tion staff. One idea is to offload the control it. What does this mean? ing point for information collec- “easy” tasks either to automation Well, there are metrics for service tion, and an online content man- (while avoiding the “one-off” goals (availability and reliability agement tool called Drupal was problem and being careful with are the big two), in-person meet- explored naming standards) or to more jun- ings for when levels aren’t met, (http://education.sage.org/drupal). ior staff so that senior staff can and so on. Do the metrics help the The goal of the Web site is to spend their time on more interest- SAs at all, or just management? It enable more collaboration and ing things. Management buy-in is can help the SAs identify a flaw in cooperation between groups essential; exposing all concerned procedures or infrastructure, or working on university sysadmin to LISA papers and books in the show an area for improvement education. field has helped in some environ- (such as new hardware purchases ments. Like many of our problems, or upgrades). We want to stress Over the last two years, there has this is a sociological one and not that you can’t measure what you been a reduction in the number of just a technical one.