Central System Administration in a Heterogeneous Unix Environment: GeNUAdmin

Abstract

GeNUAdmin is an automatic system administration tool to control the configuration and administration of Unix workstations of different vendors from a central management host. All relevant data about the system are kept in a central data repository. The configuration for each machine is extracted from these databases. Configuration files and installation methods are generated for many different architectures. Before calculating and updating the configuration of each machine many consistency checks using pattern matching or inherent data correlations are performed. This assures data consistency as well as configuration consistency for a large number of machines and users. The system is written in perl and creates Bourne shell scripts to accomplish its tasks. The prerequisites for using it are minimal. GeNUAdmin is available without charge.