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USENIX Tenth System Administration Conference (LISA
'96)
SLINK: Simple, Effective Filesystem Maintenance
Abstractions for Community-Based Administration
Alva L. Couch
Tufts University
Abstract
We manage several large UNIX program repositories through a
community effort of volunteerism and advocacy. Our effort requires
a carefully crafted interplay between administrative policy and
tools that operate within the limits of that policy. Rather than
restricting administrators' actions, our tools reinforce their own
use by making it easier and more effective to comply with policy
than to dissent. Our tool SLINK provides a small number of commands
that aid in synthesizing user environments from sets of disjoint
software package trees. SLINK's commands, while more powerful than
typical UNIX commands, refuse to violate predefined policy
restrictions, thus protecting the user environment even from
mistakes of root users. Our administrative policy and SLINK allow
us to employ an arbitrarily large number of volunteer
administrators without degrading system behavior or utilizing large
amounts of staff time.
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