Maelstrom: network debugging via 'ineffective' procedures

• Download current version (mael0.4Alpha).
• Read documentation.
• Read LISA 2001 paper.
• Read LISA 2001 slides.

Description

'The Maelstrom' is a substitute for 'make' specifically aimed at network troubleshooting tasks. Input to Maelstrom is a set of script invocations. Maelstrom tries to make each script 'succeed' (as indicated by an exit code of 0).

Scripts to be used by Maelstrom should exhibit three properties:

• Awareness: the script knows whether it has succeeded and returns 0 only for a true success.
• Convergence: the script makes no unnecessary changes, so that a second success has no effect after an initial one.
• Homogeneity: the script does not undo or conflict with the changes made by other scripts within the set.

If the scripts have the properties of 'awareness', 'convergence', and 'homogeneity', then Maelstrom will make all of them succeed if they possibly can, even if there are unknown dependencies between their effects. Maelstrom discovers these dependencies by executing the scripts in all possible orders and recording successes.

Maelstrom is written in generic Perl-5 to be portable to most every system in creation.