Environmental Acquisition in Network Management

Maintaining configurations in heterogeneous networks poses complex problems. We observe that medium and large networks exhibit many contextual relationships, and argue that modeling these relationships explicitly simplifies configuration management. This paper presents a declarative data specification language, called Anomaly, that implements our ideas. Anomaly models containment relationships and uses a data aggregation technique called environmental acquisition to simplify system management. The interpreter for the language generates and deploys configurations from a source code description of the network and its hosts.