The Arusha Project: A Framework for Collaborative UNIX System Administration

The Arusha Project is an independent open-source project centered on the premise that the best hope for Unix system administration at modest-sized sites is through large-scale Internet-wide collaboration. We present a simple object model as a thinking tool, and an XML-based configuration language as a concrete notation for expressing system-administrative facts. We show how this framework allows a gentle evolution from current practices, but gets us quickly to very powerful ways of working.