Delegation: Uniformity in Heterogeneous Distribued Administration

We describe a distributed administration tool based on the concept of delegation. Management operations are lightweight processes created on a manager's machine, but executed remotely on specific targets. Various libraries are provided on target machines to cover the widest range of administration tasks such as modification of configuration files, recurrent, scheduled executions of programs or process monitoring. The result is a single, unified framework for the majority of administrative operations, and a distributed platform to facilitate its use in a flexible way. The language used to realize the platform is small, unobtrusive, and robust.