A novel approach to automating operating system configuration management

Abstract

In the last few years, operating system configuration management tools have seen a dramatic rise in popularity. The reason is that system administrators need to operate on a higher number of servers than before, and because of that, they need tools to automate some of their work. This work summarizes the advantages and disadvantages of existing tools, and proposes a novel approach to operating system configuration management. The author defines a new programming language for describing an operating system configuration, and then describes a method for producing programs from a source file written in this language. These programs make appropriate changes to the system’s state, applying the desired configuration. This approach allows for features not present in other tools, while also potentially consuming less resources, and having less runtime dependencies.