An intelligent agent to aid in UNIX system administration

Abstract

An intelligent agent is “anything that can be viewed as perceiving its environment through sensors and acting upon its environment through effectors”. An agent performs its work by using rules (or knowledge) that maps the information its sensors give it to actions it is supposed to perform. In order to assist system administrators with some very important yet routine tasks, an intelligent agent was developed. The agent monitors certain system parameters and situations, decides if corrective action is warranted, and carries out the corrective action. Four of the most important UNIX system administrator tasks are the focus of this intelligent agent. These tasks are: detecting inactive accounts, changing the priority of CPU-intensive processes when the system load is high, deleting old files (such as core files or old backup files), and trimming the wtmp and wtmpx files.