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USENIX ;login, April 2009

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Some Writings about System Administration and IT Operations

A selection of some of the things I have written over the years: (PR = "peer reviewed")

  1. 1993: Original CFEngine paper
  2. PR 1995: CFEngine: a site configuration engine
  3. PR 1998: Computer Immunology
    Explains the manifesto for self-healing, autononomic systems.
  4. PR 2000: Principles of Network and System Administration. (Wiley)
  5. 2000-2001: Needles in the Craystack: or Why Machines Get Sick
  6. PR 2000-2003: On the theory of system administration
    Details the concepts of maintenance and policy.
  7. PR 2000-2004: Configurable immunity for evolving human-computer systems,
    Details the concept of convergence.
  8. PR 2002: Measuring system normality, ACM Transactions on Computing Systems 20, p.125-160 (2002)(with H. Haugerud and S. Straumsnes and T. Reitan)
    First empirical study of networked computers as a problem of incomplete information.
  9. PR 2003: Analytical Network and System Administration: Managing Human-Computer Systems
  10. 2004: Talking to the Walls
  11. 2004: Began work on "promises".
  12. PR 2004: Scalability of peer configuration management in logically ad hoc networks, IEEE eTransactions on Network and Service Management vol 1(1)
  13. 2006: Configuration Management: Models and Myths
  14. PR 2006: 2006: Probabilistic anomaly detection in distributed computer networks. Science of Computer Programming. Volume 60 Issue 1, March 2006.
    Explanation of the empirically grounded data model that explains CFEngine's scalable monitoring.
  15. 2007: Promise You A Rose Garden
  16. PR 2007: A risk analysis of disk backup or repository maintenance. Science of Computer Programming 2007;64:312-331
    Optimization of risk management in IT systems.
  17. PR 2011: On system rollback and totalised fields. An algebraic approach to system change, Journal of Logic and Algebraic Programming 80 (2011), pp. 427-443 DOI information: 10.1016/j.jlap.2011.07.001
    Proof of the impossibility of roll-back in non-trivial IT systems.
  18. 2012: CFEngine, SysAdmin 3.0 and the Third Wave of IT Engineering.
  19. Work in progress: A Foundational Theory of Promises