Stem: The System Administration Enabler

Stem is a system administration ``enabler.'' It is not an administrative tool, but rather a general-purpose development framework that allows an administrator to craft tools to perform a wide variety of tasks in a distributed environment easily and quickly. Many common tasks can be performed with Stem scripts involving a few lines of declarations. Current example applications include log file collating and service load balancing. Using Stem, a non-programmer can craft reliable network software in a few lines of declarations that would require hundreds or thousands of lines of code in a traditional programming language such as C.