Deterministic System Administration

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Abstract: 

The vision is clear and seductive: take a modest-sized specification of a computing environment and automatically derive all the stuff you actually need, from DHCP configurations to ordering cables. Is it possible to account for every box, every cable, every RAID box, every volume mounted, every OS deployed? I describe an attempt to do so, fighting the forces of Chaos and Nature, armed only with logical positivism, Ruby, little languages, and sarcasm.

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BibTeX
@conference {268024,
author = {Andrew Hume},
title = {Deterministic System Administration},
year = {2008},
address = {San Diego, CA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = nov
}
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