[Infrastructures] using IA methodologies to build network element configuration

[Matt S Trout]

On Sat, Apr 02, 2005 at 02:55:34PM -0500, Daniel Hagerty wrote:
>     The routing policy is by far from the only example (like the
> firewalls you're avoiding), but it all comes down to the same problems
> in the end:
> 
>     You have a large, distributed system.  Each part of it has to be
> consistent with the the whole for the distributed system to perform
> correctly.  Whether the distributed system consists primarily of unix
> machines,  or routers is of little consequence -- distributed system
> is distributed system.
> 
>     If the world was perfect, you could write down a language that
> described your entire distributed system, and produce all the other
> configuration aspects of it from this one uber language.  In practice,
> there's some getting there from here to achieve this.  People are able
> to do it now to more or lesser extents, but we're still producing
> these languages in an ad hoc fashion.

This is why I'm attempting to build an XML-driven transformation engine
that can be used to build up a common library of transforms for various
types of devices. It's called BAST, and is still at a very early stage,
but it anybody wants to have a look at it, there's a tarball at
http://trout.me.uk/perl/ - have a look in the 'data/network/' directory
for some proof-of-concept work generating configurations for switches.

-- 
    Matt S Trout            Brag sheet:    http://trout.me.uk/services.html
LAMP, Infrastructure        Contact:       services@trout.me.uk
   and Automation
     specialist                                       Do it once. Do it right.