Background

For many years, the Unix community has recognised the inadequacy of vendor-supplied configuration tools for managing large networks of disparate machines. A wide range of solutions have been proposed and developed by systems administrators, frequently just for their own use. These range from simple cloning mechanisms to highly flexible systems (a survey of some previous techniques is available in [1]).

The LCFG framework [3] was developed by The Department of Computer Science at Edinburgh University to handle their own network of several hundred (mostly Solaris) Unix machines. This system was designed to satisfy several fundamental properties that we could not find in any existing implementation, and has been very successful. Over the last three years, the site has migrated rapidly towards Linux, and the LCFG framework has been ported and extended to support this with good results. The Department has recently merged with several others to form the Division of Informatics and work is underway to extend the use of LCFG to the larger domain. As part of this work, we are taking the opportunity to improve the design and implementation in some areas.