Group Communication as an Infrastructure for Distributed Systems Management

In the past, system management tools for computer systems were oriented towards managing a single com-puter with, possibly, many users. When the networked system concept became widespread, centralized solu-tions such as the Network Information Service (NIS 1 were developed to help the system manager to control a network of workstations. Today, when many sites contain hundreds of workstations, these solutions may no longer be adequate. This paper proposes the usage of techniques, devel-oped for group communication and database replica-tion, for distributed cluster management. We show how group communication can be exploited to provide three classes of frequently needed operations: simulta-neous execution of the same operation in a group of workstations; software installation in multiple work-stations; and consistent network table management (improving the consistency of NIS)