[121975] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Mitigating human error in the SP
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Steven Bellovin)
Tue Feb 2 21:44:58 2010
From: Steven Bellovin <smb@cs.columbia.edu>
In-Reply-To: <bb0e440a1002021736n5ff80b9bsd2a9b6535982b18c@mail.gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 2 Feb 2010 21:44:25 -0500
To: Suresh Ramasubramanian <ops.lists@gmail.com>
Cc: nanog@nanog.org
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
On Feb 2, 2010, at 8:36 PM, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote:
> Never said it was, and never said foolproof either. Minimizing the
> chance of error is what I'm after - and ssh'ing in + hand typing
> configs isn't the way to go.
>=20
> Use a known good template to provision stuff - and automatically
> deploy it, and the chances of human error go down quite a lot. Getting
> it down to zero defect from there is another kettle of fish altogether
> - a much more expensive with dev / test, staging and production
> environments, documented change processes, maintenance windows etc.
>=20
Yup. Or use a database and a template-driven compiler. See =
"Configuration management and security", IEEE Journal on Selected Areas =
in Communications, 27(3):268-274, April 2009, by myself and Randy Bush, =
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/papers/config-jsac.pdf (the system =
described is Randy's work, from many years ago).
--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb
