Researching system administration

Abstract

System administration is a phenomenally important, yet surprisingly ignored sub-field of Computer Science. We hypothesize that this avoidance is because approaches for performing academic research on system administration problems are not well known. To reduce the difficulty of performing research, we present a small set of principles that can be used to evaluate solutions, a classification of existing research on system administration, and three approaches to research on system administration that we illustrate with the research that we have done. First, we