SysAdminFrame - Systems Administration Framework -

Abstract

Organizations from across a variety of industries are embracing software systems and applications, realizing the enormous competitive advantages through accuracy, reduced cycle times and increased customer service. Systems and applications developed by a thousand and one different vendors are running on diverse operating systems and platforms in a typical organization. Nonavailability of standard commands or methodologies for administering heterogeneous systems and their applications result in the administrator needing to be aware of ample commands.

In this endeavor the author proposes application vendors to comply with a standard interface so that a single series of unique commands could be utilized in a system administration, immaterial to the application. Although the requirement can be fulfilled through a tool with support for the required features the author has introduced a Systems Administration Framework, which is capable of administering different systems in a heterogeneous environment and is operational over the Internet.

Initially the thesis explores the background and available technologies, design issues to be tackled and development issues in the central system administration process. The main reason for the framework to be introduced is the adaptability to any environment within the given conditions. In the proposed Framework, Web Services has been chosen since it is an immerging technology in distributed computing which appears to be well suited to serve the purpose of the per-said framework. Accordingly each server to be managed exposes its own Web Service to the external environment while the Management Server can invoke the administration process and behave as a single point of administration. In conclusion the thesis presents a comprehensive framework to strengthen the system administration task.