More Web Proxy on the site http://driver.im/

Article

Seeking Closure in an Open World: A Behavioral Agent Approach to Configuration Management

Authors:

Elizabeth G. Idhaw,

Dominic KallasAuthors Info & Claims

LISA '03: Proceedings of the 17th USENIX conference on System administration

Pages 125 - 148

Published: 31 October 2003 Publication History

Abstract

We present a new model of configuration management based upon a hierarchy of simple communicating autonomous agents. Each of these agents is responsible for a "closure": a domain of "semantic predictability" in which declarative commands to the agent have a simple, persistent, portable, and documented effect upon subsequent observable behavior. Closures are built bottom-up to form a management hierarchy based upon the pre-existing dependencies between subsystems in a complex system. Closure agents decompose configuration management via a modularity of effect and behavior that promises to eventually lead to self-organizing systems driven entirely by behavioral specifications, where a system's configuration is free of details that have no observable effect upon system.

References

[1]

Anderson, P., "Towards a High-Level Machine Configuration System," Proc. LISA-VIII, Usenix Assoc., 1994.

[2]

Anderson, P., P. Goldsack, and J. Patterson, "SmartFrog Meets LCFG: Autonomous Reconfiguration with Central Policy Control," Proc. LISA XVII, USENIX Assoc., pp. 219-228, San Diego, CA, 2003.

[3]

Bohlman, E., "Parsing XML, Part 1," http://www.perlmonth.com/perlmonth/issue4/perl_xml.html.

[4]

Burgess, Mark, "A Site Configuration Engine," Computing Systems, Vol. 8, 1995.

[5]

Burgess, Mark and R. Ralston, "Distributed Resource Administration Using Cfengine," Software: Practice and Experience, Vol. 27, 1997.

[6]

Burgess, Mark, "Computer Immunology," Proc. LISA-XII, Boston, MA, Usenix, 1998.

[7]

Burgess, Mark, "Theoretical system Administration," Proc. LISA-XIV, New Orleans, LA, Usenix, 2000.

[8]

Cons, Lionel and Piotr Poznanski, "Pan: A High-Level Configuration Language," Proc. LISA XVI, USENIX, Philadelphia, PA, 2002.

[9]

Cooper, C., "XML::Parser - A Perl Module for Parsing XML Documents," http://search.cpan.org/author/COOPERCL/XML-Parser-2.31/Parser.pm.

[10]

Couch, Alva, "SLINK: Simple, Effective Filesystem Maintenance Abstractions for Community-based Administration," Proc. LISA X, Usenix, 1996.

[11]

Couch, Alva, "Chaos out of Order: A Simple, Scalable File Distribution Facility for 'Intentionally Heterogeneous' Networks," Proc. LISA XI, Usenix, 1997.

[12]

Couch, Alva and M. Gilfix, "It's Elementary, Dear Watson: Applying Logic Programming to Convergent System Management Processes," Proc. LISA XIII, Usenix, 1999.

[13]

Couch, Alva, "An Expectant Chat about Script Maturity," Proc. LISA XIV, Usenix, 2000.

[14]

Couch, Alva and Noah Daniels, "The Maelstrom: Network Service Debugging via 'Ineffective Procedures'," Proc. LISA XV, Usenix, 2001.

[15]

Couch, Alva and Y. Sun, "Global Impact Analysis of Dynamic Library Dependencies," Proc. LISA XV, Usenix, San Diego, CA, 2001.

[16]

Couch, A. and Y. Sun, "On the Algebraic Structure of Convergence," to appear in Proc. DSOM'03, Elsevier, Heidelberg, DE, Oct., 2003.

[17]

Hart, J. and J. D'Amelia, "An Analysis of RPM Validation Drift," Proc. LISA XVI, Usenix Assoc., San Diego, CA, 2002.

[18]

Holgate, M. and W. Partain, "The Arusha Project: A Framework for Collaborative Unix System Administration," Proc. LISA XV, Usenix, San Diego CA, 2001.

[19]

Holgate, M., W. Partain, et al., The Arusha Project Web Site http://ark.sourceforge.net.

[20]

Kanies, L., "Practical and Theoretical Experience with ISconf and Cfengine," Proc. LISA XV, USENIX Assoc., San Diego CA, 2001.

[21]

Sandnes, Frode Eika, "Scheduling Partially Ordered Events in a Randomised Framework - Empirical Results and Implications for Automatic Configuration Management," Proc. LISA XV, Usenix, San Diego CA, 2001.

[22]

Finke, Jon, "An Improved Approach for Generating Configuration Files from a Database," Proc. LISA XIV, Usenix, 2000.

[23]

Finke, Jon, "Generating Configuration Files: The Director's Cut," Proc. LISA XVII, USENIX Assoc., pp. 201-210, San Diego, CA, 2003.

[24]

Grillet, P. A., Semigroups: An Introduction to the Structure Theory, Marcel Dekker, Inc, New York, NY, 1995.

[25]

Guttman, U., "Stem: A Sysadmin Enabler," Proc. LISA XVI, Usenix, Philadelphia, PA, 2002.

[26]

Halprin, G., et al., "SA-BOK (The Systems Administration Body of Knowledge)," http://www.sysadmin.com.au/sa-bok.html.

[27]

Harold, E. and S. Means, "XML in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition," O'Reilly, Inc, 2002.

[28]

Howie, J. M., An Introduction to Semigroup Theory, Academic Press, 1976.

[29]

Humphries, Pat, Same Rain (Audio CD), Moving Forward Music, 1992.

[30]

Kolstad, R., et al., The Sysadmin Book of Knowledge Gateway, (private site).

[31]

Lehti, Rami, "AIDE - Advanced Intrusion Detection Environment," http://www.cs.tut.fi/~rammer/aide.html.

[32]

Ljapin, E. S., Semigroups, American Mathematical Society, Providence, RI, 1963.

[33]

Logan, Mark, Matthias Felleisen, and David Blank-Edelman, "Environmental Acquisition in Network Management" Proc. LISA XVI, Usenix, Philadelphia, PA, 2002.

[34]

Oetiker, T.,"TemplateTree II: The Post-Installation Setup Tool," Proc. LISA XV, Usenix, San Diego, CA, 2001.

[35]

Patterson, J., "A Simple Model of the Cost of Downtime," Proc. LISA XVI, Usenix, Philadelphia, PA, 2002.

[36]

Roth, M. D., "Preventing Wheel Reinvention: The Psgconf System Configuration Framework," Proc. LISA XVII, pp. 211-218, USENIX, San Diego, CA, 2003.

[37]

Traugott, Steve and Joel Huddleston, "Bootstrapping an Infrastructure," Proc LISA XII, Usenix, Boston, MA, 1998.

[38]

Traugott, Steve and Lance Brown, "Why Order Matters: Turing Equivalence in Automated Systems Administration," Proc. LISA XVI, Usenix, Philadelphia, PA, 2002.

[39]

Sapuntzakis, C., D. Brumley, R. Chandra, N. Zeldovich, J. Chow, J. Norris, M. S. Lam, and M. Rosenblum, "Virtual Appliances for Deploying and Maintaining Software," Proc. LISA XVII, pp. 186-200, USENIX, San Diego, CA, 2003.

[40]

Wang, Yi-Min, Chad Verbowski, John Dunagan, Yu Chen, Chun Yuan, Helen J. Wang, and Zheng Zhang, "STRIDER: A Black-box, State-based Approach to Change and Configuration Management and Support," Proc. LISA XVII, pp. 165-178, Usenix, San Diego, CA, 2003.

[41]

Watt, D., Programming Language Syntax and Semantics, Prentice Hall, 1991.

[42]

The Linux Standard Base Project, http://www.linuxbase.org.

[43]

Tripwire, Inc, The Tripwire Security Scanner, http://www.tripwire.com.

[44]

XML Working Group, XML Schema Specification, http://www.w3c.org.

Cited By

Fagernes SCouch A(2018)Resource-sharing among autonomous agentsService Oriented Computing and Applications10.1007/s11761-018-0244-212:3-4(317-331)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s11761-018-0244-2
Weerasiri DBarukh MBenatallah BSheng QRanjan R(2017)A Taxonomy and Survey of Cloud Resource Orchestration TechniquesACM Computing Surveys10.1145/305417750:2(1-41)Online publication date: 10-May-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3054177
Finstadsveen JBegnum KMoskowitz AHawkey KBeznosov KAnderson P(2011)What a webserver can learn from a zebra and what we learned in the processProceedings of the 5th ACM Symposium on Computer Human Interaction for Management of Information Technology10.1145/2076444.2076449(1-8)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2076444.2076449
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Seeking Closure in an Open World: A Behavioral Agent Approach to Configuration Management
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Artificial intelligence
    1. Distributed artificial intelligence
      1. Intelligent agents
2. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Management of computing and information systems

Recommendations

Behavioral Modeling of Multi Agent System: High Level Petri Net Based Approach

Modeling interactions between agents and the Multi-Agent System MAS behavior based on role based collaboration among the participating agents are the key factors to design of effective MAS dynamics. In this paper, a High level Multi Agent Petri Net ...
Contextualizing normative open multi-agent systems
SAC '08: Proceedings of the 2008 ACM symposium on Applied computing

Open MASs can be extremely dynamic due to heterogeneous agents that migrate among them to obtain resources or services not found locally. In order to prevent malicious actions and to ensure agent trust, open MAS should be enhanced with normative ...
Configuration management for multi-agent systems
AGENTS '01: Proceedings of the fifth international conference on Autonomous agents

As heterogeneous distributed systems, multi-agent systems present some challenging configuration management issues. There are the problems of knowing how to allocate agents to computers, launch them on remote hosts, and once the agents have been ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image Guide Proceedings

LISA '03: Proceedings of the 17th USENIX conference on System administration

October 2003

307 pages

Publisher

USENIX Association

United States

Publication History

Published: 31 October 2003

Qualifiers

Article

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

9
Total Citations
View Citations
0
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)0
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0

Reflects downloads up to 19 Dec 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Fagernes SCouch A(2018)Resource-sharing among autonomous agentsService Oriented Computing and Applications10.1007/s11761-018-0244-212:3-4(317-331)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s11761-018-0244-2
Weerasiri DBarukh MBenatallah BSheng QRanjan R(2017)A Taxonomy and Survey of Cloud Resource Orchestration TechniquesACM Computing Surveys10.1145/305417750:2(1-41)Online publication date: 10-May-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3054177
Finstadsveen JBegnum KMoskowitz AHawkey KBeznosov KAnderson P(2011)What a webserver can learn from a zebra and what we learned in the processProceedings of the 5th ACM Symposium on Computer Human Interaction for Management of Information Technology10.1145/2076444.2076449(1-8)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2076444.2076449
Couch ABurgess MVan Drunen R(2010)Troubleshooting with human-readable automated reasoningProceedings of the 24th international conference on Large installation system administration10.5555/1924976.1925000Online publication date: 7-Nov-2010
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1924976.1925000
Delaet TJoosen WVanbrabant BVan Drunen R(2010)A survey of system configuration toolsProceedings of the 24th international conference on Large installation system administration10.5555/1924976.1924977(1-8)Online publication date: 7-Nov-2010
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1924976.1924977
Couch AChiarini M(2009)Combining Learned and Highly-Reactive ManagementProceedings of the 4th IEEE International Workshop on Modelling Autonomic Communications Environments10.1007/978-3-642-05006-0_1(1-14)Online publication date: 22-Oct-2009
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-642-05006-0_1
Couch ABurgess MChiarini M(2009)Management without (Detailed) ModelsProceedings of the 6th International Conference on Autonomic and Trusted Computing10.1007/978-3-642-02704-8_7(75-89)Online publication date: 30-Jun-2009
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-642-02704-8_7
Couch AChiarini M(2009)Dynamics of Resource Closure OperatorsProceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Autonomous Infrastructure, Management and Security: Scalability of Networks and Services10.1007/978-3-642-02627-0_3(28-41)Online publication date: 19-Jun-2009
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-642-02627-0_3
Delaet TJoosen W(2007)PoDIMProceedings of the 21st conference on Large Installation System Administration Conference10.5555/1349426.1349447(1-13)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2007
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1349426.1349447

View Options

View options

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents