Decentralising Distributed Systems Administration
Christine Hogan - Synopsys, Inc.
Aoife Cox - Lockheed-Martin, Inc.
Tim Hunter - Synopsys, Inc.
Abstract
Nowadays, system administration most often involves maintaining a collection of
distributed, interoperating machines. The manner in which this task is carried out, however,
is usually more reminiscent of a centralised computing model, with a small number of
machines playing host to all of the critical system services, and constituting common failure
points for the entire distributed system.
In this paper, we argue that the adoption of a distributed approach to administration of
these systems is not only more natural, but can also be shown to have many practical benefits
for the system administrator. In particular, we show, by example, how distributed object
technology, as reflected in the CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture)
standard, can be used to construct a distributed administration framework, tying together
services and servers on many different nodes, bringing some of the advantages of distributed
systems to the systems administrator.
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