[Beowulf] Systems administration survey

[Kiran Nagaraja]

Hi,
We are a systems research group at the Computer Science department
at Rutgers University, and are conducting a survey to understand
details about network, systems and database administration. We hope
that this information would help us recreate a realistic environment
to help research in 'systems management'.

We request network, systems, and database administrators to take this
survey. As an incentive, all surveys completed in their entirety will
be entered into a drawing of a number of $50 gift certificates (from
Amazon.com).

We hope you have few minutes to take the survey which is located at:

http://vivo.cs.rutgers.edu/administration_survey.html

Research in our group:
The goal of our research is to improve the overall availability and
maintainability of services. Since administrators form an integral part
of these services, a key aspect of this work is to build environments
and tools that ease the task of service administration. In particular,
environments which would help administrators know how their actions
might impact the real service (before performing them for real), we
believe, would be useful in preventing inadvertent actions. This survey
tries to understand the existing environments, what administrators do
currently to test the 'validity' of their actions, and the difficulties
they face in doing so. The two specific systems we are looking at are
networks and databases, as we believe these are important components of
many services.

If you have any questions regarding this survey or our work, feel free
to email us:
Kiran Nagaraja (knagaraj at cs.rutgers.edu), or
Fabio Oliveira (fabiool at cs.rutgers.edu)

Thanks for your time,

Kiran Nagaraja
Graduate student, Vivo Research Group (http://vivo.cs.rutgers.edu)
Rutgers University.