Probably the toughest assignment of the Master’s course so far, but we made the deadline and have now learnt how to be nice to System Administrators. This did not involve us learning how to make them cups of tea, get them the newspaper etc. What it did involve is building systems that manage themselves.
To see what we’re talking about, take a look at the project we put together (links below). It’s a document share system running on 1, 10 or as many computers as you want. It uses Peer-2-Peer (p2p) technology so that even if you pull the plug the others take over and replicate the documents. Ok, it’s not quite ready for venture capital funding, but this idea of ‘self-management’ means that nobody get’s called out of
bed for something that the computer can learn to manage itself.
Links.
Paul Browne 