Automating the Administration of Heterogeneous LANs

The areas of machine configuration and software package installation and maintenance have been frequent areas of work in recent years. This paper describes a hybrid system developed to address both problems and more. The resulting system is designed to reduce the complexity of the administration of a large network of computers down to that of the administration of a few heterogeneous systems. In particular, this system allows machines to be maintained without ever having to manually change files on their disks. Systems can also be upgraded, installed from scratch, or recovered with a minimum of effort. The system described is designed to be extremely general and applicable to virtually all versions of UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems.