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Revision control practices applied to computer configurations

Published: 06 November 2005 Publication History

Abstract

The standard computer configuration process at Drew University was far from a formalized procedure. Computer lab workstations, classroom computers, faculty and staff desktops, library public workstations, and student laptops were imaged with different configurations, created independently by several different staff members. When a configuration problem occurred, the staff member responsible for the configuration was the only source of information to troubleshoot problems.With the introduction of Windows XP in 2002, image creation was centralized for all non-server configurations, drawing from the individual methods of all staff members. The standardized configuration was used interdepartmentally, and the steps were made publicly accessible.In August of 2004, a plan was drafted to take advantage of this centralized system, when an image versioning system was suggested. Using standard revision control practices, the exact configuration of a machine could be gathered from the version number of the image found on it. Whether or not a certain patch was applied or application was upgraded could be ascertained from this information, and the appropriate level of support offered before an upgrade was suggested.Computer configurations are created initially as virtual machines on VMware Workstation, allowing support personnel to try to reproduce a problem with the customer's configuration, and giving system administrators a way to test patches on different configurations that exist out in the field before applying them over the network. This paper will examine the versioning system used and explain its benefits.

References

[1]
http://novell.com/products/edirectory/
[2]
http://novell.com/products/zenworks/
[3]
Modifying Ntuser.dat So New Users Get Defined Settings, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/146050/
[4]
An update package that includes BITS 2.0 and WinHTTP 5.1 is available for Windows Server 2003, for Windows XP, and for Windows 2000, http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=842773&SD=tech
[5]
E. Axel Larsson and Russell Sprague. eXtreme deployment: distributing and configuring 450 student laptops in five hours. In Proceedings of the 32nd annual ACM SIGUCCS conference on User services (SIGUCCS 2004) (Baltimore, MD, USA, October 10-13, 2004). ACM Press, New York, NY, 2000, 87--90
[6]
http://www.vmware.com/products/desktop/ws_features.html
[7]
http://www.vmware.com/support/ws5/doc/whatsnew_ws.html
[8]
http://plone.org/
[9]
Wiki: What is Wiki? http://wiki.org/wiki.cgi?WhatIsWiki

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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGUCCS '05: Proceedings of the 33rd annual ACM SIGUCCS conference on User services
November 2005
482 pages
ISBN:1595932003
DOI:10.1145/1099435
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 06 November 2005

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Author Tags

  1. imaging
  2. revision control
  3. versioning
  4. windows

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SIGUCCS Fall05
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Overall Acceptance Rate 123 of 170 submissions, 72%

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