Configuration Management Tools Research Articles

MiniDAQ-3: Providing concurrent independent subdetector data-taking on CMS production DAQ resources

The data acquisition (DAQ) of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at CERN, collects data for events accepted by the Level-1 Trigger from the different detector systems and assembles them in an event builder prior to making them available for further selection in the High Level Trigger, and finally storing the selected events for offline analysis. In addition to the central DAQ providing global acquisition functionality, several separate, so-called “MiniDAQ” setups allow operating independent data acquisition runs using an arbitrary subset of the CMS subdetectors. During Run 2 of the LHC, MiniDAQ setups were running their event builder and High Level Trigger applications on dedicated resources, separate from those used for the central DAQ. This cleanly separated MiniDAQ setups from the central DAQ system, but also meant limited throughput and a fixed number of possible MiniDAQ setups. In Run 3, MiniDAQ-3 setups share production resources with the new central DAQ system, allowing each setup to operate at the maximum Level-1 rate thanks to the reuse of the resources and network bandwidth. Configuration management tools had to be significantly extended to support the synchronization of the DAQ configurations needed for the various setups. We report on the new configuration management features and on the first year of operational experience with the new MiniDAQ-3 system.

Policy-Based Holistic Application Management with BPMN and TOSCA

With the wide adoption of cloud computing across technology industries and research institutions, an ever-growing interest in cloud orchestration frameworks has emerged over the past few years. These orchestration frameworks enable the automated provisioning and decommissioning of cloud applications in a timely and efficient manner, but they offer limited or no support for application management. While management functionalities, such as configuring, monitoring and scaling single components, can be directly covered by cloud providers and configuration management tools, holistic management features, such as backing up, testing and updating multiple components, cannot be automated using these approaches. In this paper, we propose a concept to automatically generate executable holistic management workflows based on the TOSCA standard. The practical feasibility of the approach is validated through a prototype implementation and a case study.

Automation of Server Configuration Using Ansible

Abstract: System information like RAM, storage, IP address of the device, operating system, software’s installed are defined as the configurations of that system and to add, update or delete these configurations is known as the management. When a tool automates this same task, it is called a configuration management tool. A system engineer witnesses a couple of problems with manual configuration approach and an abundance of repetitive tasks which are time-consuming and are prone to human errors. Server configuration is a huge landscape that has to be maintained properly from the start. Hence, configuration management and provisioning tool like Ansible, Chef, Puppet or Salt are used. Ansible is one of the best open-source tools to automate and maintain the configuration. Ansible controls and configure nodes from a single machine. What makes it unique from other configuration management tool is that it makes use of SSH infrastructure and is very secure due its agentless property. Ansible is the solution to get rid of all the hassle in server management because it facilitates to build easy IT automation engine to save time and be more productive

The development of the alarm system for HLS-II

Hefei Light Source II (HLS-II) is a vacuum ultraviolet synchrotron light source. The control system of HLS-II is a distributed system based on the experimental physics and industrial control system (EPICS). The alarm system of HLS-II is responsible for monitoring the alarm state of the facility and distributing the alarm message in time. It facilitates the operator to troubleshoot problem efficiently, so as to improve the availability of HLS-II. Phoebus/Alarms (Alarms) is the latest alarm software released in EPICS community. Based on Alarms, the alarm system of HLS-II is designed, developed and deployed. The alarm distribution strategy is designed from the perspective of the HLS-II operation mode, alarm severity and alarm representative to overcome alarm floods. The 3 ways to distribute the alarm message are added to the HLS-II alarm system, which include WeChat, SMS and web-based GUI. In order to configure alarm options efficiently and conveniently, an alarm configuration management tool is developed based on the MySQL database and Browser/Server architecture. The alarm system of HLS-II has been deployed since November 2021. The result indicates that the alarm system is effective and convenient to operate.

Improved Data Security in Cloud Environment for Test Automation Framework and Access Control for Industry 4.0

In analyzing project regressions, automation has emerged as a major agenda in managing changes in software which requires minimum manual intervention. For rapid testing environment, software development processes such as Agile, Scrum, and XP processes depend on continuous integration tools. There is no single tool to handle the project automation, and the main challenge is dependency on multiple tools. The proposed automation tool should support configuration, execution, and debugging facility. Integrating the project automation works such as software configuration management tools Mercurial and Git, job scheduling tools like Jenkins and Apache Continuum, test management tools like TestNG and Selenium need tight integration which is a challenge. The existing PKI infrastructure for access control does not share data among the software tools and processes increasing the complexity when an organization needs to leverage the existing cloud services. The proposed approach optimizes the execution time by taking single CSV with input test case and metadata information and efficiently group and executes the tests automatically. The proposed method includes implementation of security access control mechanism for the jobs execution platform in cloud environment.

Novel approach for semantic similarity cross ontology

Measuring <span>semantic similarity between terms is a crucial step in information retrieval and integration since it necessitates semantic content matching. Even though several models have been proposed to measure semantic similarity, these models are not able to effectively quantify the weight of relevant items that affect the semantic similarity judgment process. In this study, we present a new method for measuring semantic similarity between cross-ontologies, that consists of hybridizing node-based approaches such as WuP and Reda with the weight of similarity computed using WordNet. The proposed approach has been experimented to show its efficiency with two ontologies, configuration management tool (CMT) and ConfOf, from the conference domaine in the web ontology language (OWL) ontologies benchmark OAEI 2015 and evaluated using two metrics: density and cohesion.</span>

A prototype system for supporting a network of information graphs with the ability to assess the nature of the subject's knowledge

The task of modeling a subject whose cognitive activity is directed under the influence of the information environment continues to remain relevant. The difficulties in solving this problem are due to (1) the dependence of the truth of information on time, as a result of which the subject can make decisions based on outdated information, and (2) the heterogeneous nature of the information itself, which, in particular, can be intentionally false (fake). The paper proposes a model of interaction of subjects, including the exchange of information marked both by the time of its creation (receipt) and the quality of information. The model is based on a system of interacting processes and is presented as a set of information graphs describing the stages of interaction. A system of typing graphs and their constituent elements is proposed. The composition tools that allow one to assemble complex graphs from simpler ones are presented. The paper also presents a set of tools corresponding to the proposed model. The tools include a process language interpreter that provides computation of model constructs, as well as an information graph editor, type control tools, debugging tools, and configuration management tools for the computing environment. The proposed tools have been experimentally tested in the development of application systems from the field of implementing the best available technologies.

Principles of electrical grid configuration management and tasks of their implementation

THE PURPOSE. To consider and analyze the definitions of the concepts "configuration of the electrical grid", "control of the configuration of the electrical grid ", "parameters of the configuration of the electrical grid ". To justify the need to manage the configuration of electrical grid, describe the principles and methods of managing the configuration of the electrical grid. To demonstrate the implementation of the principles of managing the configuration of the electrical grid on the example of an electrical grid with a nominal voltage of 0.4 kV with the use of proprietary technical configuration management tools. METHODS. Based on the literature review, the study identified the wording of key concepts, such as" configuration of the electrical grid"," management of the electrical grid configuration", "parameters of the electrical grid configuration". Methods of managing the configuration of the electrical grid are shown. The principles of electrical grid configuration management proposed by the authors are considered, which include observability, manageability, segmentability, flexibility of the electrical grid configuration, equipment intellectualization, and integration into the economy. The essence of each of the management principles is revealed and the effects of their implementation are shown. The effects of implementing the configuration management principles are to reduce the number of power supply interruptions and reduce the time of power supply interruptions to consumers, mismatch the quality parameters of the electricity supplied to them, as well as to increase the availability of electricity infrastructure. The rationale for the need to manage the configuration of electrical grid is given. Within the framework of the conducted research, the method of system analysis, methods of comparisons and analogies, and expert assessments were used. RESULTS. On the example of the scheme of power supply to consumers at a voltage of 0.4 kV, the implementation of the principles of control of the configuration of electrical grid with the use of proprietary technical means – multi-contact switching systems, input-accounting-distribution devices integrated into the monitoring systems of the parameters of the operating modes of electrical grid and other devices is illustrated. CONCLUSION. The implementation of the principles of configuration management of electrical grid allows to increase the efficiency of power supply systems for consumers and at the same time causes the need to develop new technical means of automation and monitoring of parameters of operating modes of electrical grids.

Automated Deployment of CBC/Radio-Canada’s Media-Over-IP Data Center

<italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">CBC/Radio-Canada is finalizing its new Internet Protocol (IP)-based production center in Montréal. During the design and early deployment of this major facility, it became clear that the staging and configuration of the thousands of media devices should be automated and managed in a fashion similar to an information technology (IT) data center. In fact, these new devices require thousands of parameters to be configured, and there are more frequent updates than for conventional devices. Moreover, once the system is in place, business continuity imposes careful management of system changes to minimize the risk of technical regressions and human errors. The good news is that the IT industry has solved the problem of operating huge data centers that require high availability. Continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) practices have proven track records for operating data centers throughout their lifecycle, from configuration and provisioning, updates and changes, to sanity checks and monitoring. Tools such as Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), domain name server (DNS), IP address management (IPAM), and configuration management tools are mature and widely used. This paper presents the architecture and implementation of CBC’s automated deployment workflow. We cover requirements on endpoint devices and the technical and human-factor challenges we encountered during our journey putting in place the novel approach for the media facility. We believe that these tools and methods will be applicable as a way forward to many media-over-IP projects at all scales</i> .

IMPLEMENTATION OF DEVOPS METHOD FOR AUTOMATION OF SERVER MANAGEMENT USING ANSIBLE

&lt;p&gt;The Development and Operations (DevOps) method is develops tasks that are operationalized by IT staff including server management. DevOps is a server, coding, and tester bridge so that it can be activated automatically so that the programmer does not need to do it repeatedly. Server management is still mostly done manually by doing repetitive settings on one server and another server so that it is inefficient and requires a relatively long time, the solution by adding several employees will increase the work of making users and user management on all servers, the occurrence of human errors and burdens costs for the company. Ansible is one type of configuration management tools that can be used for the infrastructure management process from a manual program to an automatic. In this study the implementation and testing of Ansibel was done in server management. Ansibel can configure and manage user account settings on all servers automatically.&lt;/p&gt;

Using GitHub in large software engineering classes. An exploratory case study

ABSTRACT Background and Context GitHub has been recently used in Software Engineering (SE) classes to facilitate collaboration in student team projects as well as help teachers to evaluate the contributions of their students more objectively. Objective We explore the benefits and drawbacks of using GitHub as a means for team collaboration and performance evaluation in large SE classes. Method Our research method takes the form of a case study conducted in a senior level SE class with 91 students. Our study also includes entry and exit surveys, an exit interview, and a qualitative analysis of students’ commit behavior. Findings Different teams adapt GitHub to their workflow differently. Furthermore, despite the steep learning curve, using GitHub should not affect the quality of students’ submissions. However, using GitHub metrics as a proxy for evaluating team performance can be risky. Implications We provide several recommendations for integrating Web-based configuration management tools in SE classes.

Integrated automation for configuration management and operations in the ATLAS online computing farm

The online farm of the ATLAS experiment at the LHC, consisting of nearly 4000 PCs with various characteristics, provides configuration and control of the detector and performs the collection, processing, selection, and conveyance of event data from the front-end electronics to mass storage. Different aspects of the farm management are already accessible via several tools. The status and health of each node are monitored by a system based on Icinga 2 and Ganglia. PuppetDB gathers centrally all the status information from Puppet, the configuration management tool used to ensure configuration consistency of every node. The in-house Configuration Database (ConfDB) controls DHCP and PXE, while also integrating external information sources. In these proceedings we present our roadmap for integrating these and other data sources and systems, and building a higher level of abstraction on top of this foundation. An automation and orchestration tool will be able to use these systems and replace lengthy manual procedures, some of which also require interactions with other systems and teams, e.g. for the repair of a faulty node. Finally, an inventory and tracking system will complement the available data sources, keep track of node history, and improve the evaluation of long-term lifecycle management and purchase strategies.

Using the Autopilot pattern to deploy container resources at a WLCG Tier-2

Containers are becoming ubiquitous within the WLCG, with CMS announcing a requirement for its sites to provide Singularity during 2018. The ubiquity of containers means it is now possible to reify the combination of an application and its configuration into a single easy-to-deploy unit, avoiding the need to make use of a myriad of configuration management tools such as Puppet, Ansible or Salt. This allows use to be made of industry-standard devops techniques within the operations domain, such as Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD), which can lead to faster upgrades and greater system security. One interesting technique is the Autopilot pattern, which provides mechanisms for application life-cycle management which are accessible from within the container itself. Using modern service discovery techniques, each container manages its own configuration, monitors its own health, and adapts to changing requirements through the use of event triggers. In this paper, we expand on previous work to create and deploy resources to a WLCG Tier-2 via containers, and investigate the viability of using the Autopilot pattern at a WLCG site to deploy and manage computational resources.

A State of the Art: Software Configuration Management Tools for Global Software Development

Global Software Development (GSD) has emerged widely in today’s software development environment. The emergence of GSD has create difficulty to several technical areas such as Requirement Engineering, Validation and Verification; not to mention Software Configuration Management (SCM) practices. To date, many SCM tools has been proposed by the researchers to reduce the difficulties faced by GSD project developers when dealing with SCM practices. Therefore, there is a need to update on the current trend of SCM tools in GSD context in order to assist practitioners in selecting the best tools for their project. To perform the study, Systematic Mapping Studies (SMS) has been used to identify and provide an overview of the SCM tools which has been developed specifically for GSD environment. This paper contributes the following: 1) This paper synthesized the SCM tools in GSD and 2) Current trend of SCM tools in today’s software development environment also is identified.

What happened to my application? Helping end users comprehend evolution through variation management

Context: Millions of end users are creating software applications. These end users typically do not have clear requirements in mind; instead, they debug their programs into existence and reuse their own or other persons’ code. These behaviors often result in the creation of numerous variants of programs. Current end-user programming environments do not provide support for managing such variants.Objective: We wish to understand the variant creation behavior of end user programmers. Based on this understanding we wish to develop an automated system to help end user programmers efficiently manage variants.Method: We conducted an on-line survey to understand when and how end-user programmers create program variants and how they manage them. Our 124 survey respondents were recruited via email from among non-computer science majors who had taken at least one course in the computer science department at our university; the respondents were involved in the Engineering, Sciences, Arts, and Management fields. Based on the results of this survey we identified a set of design requirements for providing variation management support for end users. We implemented variation management support in App Inventor – a drag and drop programming environment for creating mobile applications. Our support, AppInventorHelper, is meant to help end-user programmers visualize the provenance of and relationships among variants. We conducted a think-aloud study with 10 participants to evaluate the usability of AppInventorHelper. The participants were selected on a first-come, first-served basis from those who responded to our recruitment email sent to list-servers. They were all end users majoring in electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, or physics. None had formal training in software engineering methods, but all had some experience with visual programming languages.Results: Our (user study) results indicate that AppInventorHelper can help end users navigate through variants and find variants that could be utilized cost-effectively as examples or actual code upon which to build new applications. For example, in one of our empirical studies end users explored variants of a paint application in order to find a variant that could easily be extended to incorporate a new feature.Conclusions: Our survey results show that end users do indeed reuse program variants and suggest that understanding the differences between variants is important. Further, end users prefer running code and looking at outputs, accessing source code and meta information such as filenames, referring to the creation and update dates of programs, and having information on the authors of code. When selecting variants users prefer to look at their major features such as correctness, similarity and authorship information. End users rely primarily on memory to track changes. They seldom make use of online or configuration management tools. Hence, integrated domain-specific variation management tools like AppInventorHelper can significantly help improve users’ interactions with the system. A key contribution of our work is a set of design requirements for end-user programming environments that facilitate the management and understanding of the provenance of program variants.

Semantic Slicing of Software Version Histories

Software developers often need to transfer functionality, e.g., a set of commits implementing a new feature or a bug fix, from one branch of a configuration management system to another. That can be a challenging task as the existing configuration management tools lack support for matching high-level, semantic functionality with low-level version histories. The developer thus has to either manually identify the exact set of semantically-related commits implementing the functionality of interest or sequentially port a segment of the change history, “inheriting” additional, unwanted functionality. In this paper, we tackle this problem by providing automated support for identifying the set of semantically-related commits implementing a particular functionality, which is defined by a set of tests. We formally define the semantic slicing problem, provide an algorithm for identifying a set of commits that constitute a slice, and propose techniques to minimize the produced slice. We then instantiate the overall approach, CSlicer , in a specific implementation for Java projects managed in Git and evaluate its correctness and effectiveness on a set of open-source software repositories. We show that it allows to identify subsets of change histories that maintain the functionality of interest but are substantially smaller than the original ones.

The evolution of monitoring system: the INFN-CNAF case study

Over the past two years, the operations at CNAF, the ICT center of the Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics, have undergone significant changes. The adoption of configuration management tools, such as Puppet, and the constant increase of dynamic and cloud infrastructures have led us to investigate a new monitoring approach. The present work deals with the centralization of the monitoring service at CNAF through a scalable and highly configurable monitoring infrastructure.The selection of tools has been made taking into account the following requirements given by users: (I) adaptability to dynamic infrastructures, (II) ease of configuration and maintenance, capability to provide more flexibility, (III) compatibility with existing monitoring system, (IV) re-usability and ease of access to information and data. In the paper, the CNAF monitoring infrastructure and its related components are hereafter described: Sensu as monitoring router, InfluxDB as time series database to store data gathered from sensors, Uchiwa as monitoring dashboard and Grafana as a tool to create dashboards and to visualize time series metrics.

A Method for Analyzing and Visualizing Intermodule Relations to Support the Reuse‐Based Embedded Software Development

SUMMARYThe number of lines of code in embedded software has been growing. In reuse‐based embedded software development, there are more and more cases in which software from two or more products is combined. The reuse of existing software has thus become inevitable. However, if the existing software to be reused is not well managed or organized, there is no way to know which modules will be affected when some parts of the reused software are modified. In this paper, we propose a method to accomplish the effective reuse of software modules by managing dependency information among modules and adding development management property data to each module. We have developed a configuration management tool that visualizes the mutual relations among existing software modules and visually presents not only the dependencies among modules but also the development management property data of the modules based on the developer's demand for the reuse of modules. We evaluated the method by applying it to some actual development projects.

Configuration and options management processes and tools: an automotive OEM case study

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to propose a three-staged approach to configuration change management that uses a combination of complexity analysis, data visualization, and algorithmic validation to assist in validating configuration changes.Design/methodology/approachIn order to accomplish the above purpose, the authors conducted a review of existing configuration management practices. This was followed by an in-depth case study of the configuration management practices of a major automotive OEM. The primary means of data collection for the case study were interviews, ethnographic study, and document analysis. Based on the results of the case study, a set of support tools is proposed to assist in the configuration management process.FindingsThrough the case study, the authors identified that the OEM used a configuration management method that largely represented the rule-based reasoning methods identified in the literature review. In addition, many of the associated challenges are present, primarily, the difficulty in making changes to the rule system and evaluating the changes.Research limitations/implicationsThe primary limitation is that the case study was based on a single OEM. However, the results are in line with other practices identified in the literature review. Therefore, it is expected that the findings and recommendations should hold true in other applications.Practical implicationsA set of configuration management tools and associated requirements are identified and defined that could be used to assist companies in the automotive industry, and perhaps others, in managing their option changes as they continue to move towards full mass customization of products.Originality/valueThe proposed approach for configuration management has not been seen in any other organization. The value of this paper is in the effectiveness of the proposed approach in assisting in the configuration change management process.

Asserting reliable convergence for configuration management scripts

The rise of elastically scaling applications that frequently deploy new machines has led to the adoption of DevOps practices across the cloud engineering stack. So-called configuration management tools utilize scripts that are based on declarative resource descriptions and make the system converge to the desired state. It is crucial for convergent configurations to be able to gracefully handle transient faults, e.g., network outages when downloading and installing software packages. In this paper we introduce a conceptual framework for asserting reliable convergence in configuration management. Based on a formal definition of configuration scripts and their resources, we utilize state transition graphs to test whether a script makes the system converge to the desired state under different conditions. In our generalized model, configuration actions are partially ordered, often resulting in prohibitively many possible execution orders. To reduce this problem space, we define and analyze a property called preservation, and we show that if preservation holds for all pairs of resources, then convergence holds for the entire configuration. Our implementation builds on Puppet, but the approach is equally applicable to other frameworks like Chef, Ansible, etc. We perform a comprehensive evaluation based on real world Puppet scripts and show the effectiveness of the approach. Our tool is able to detect all idempotence and convergence related issues in a set of existing Puppet scripts with known issues as well as some hitherto undiscovered bugs in a large random sample of scripts.