[NCLUG] using Bayesian networks for simple systems debugging?

[DJ Eshelman]

Interesting concept.

If you could figure out something like this, you could compete directly with
Cisco's claim of the self-healing network (to which I laugh), and offer a
level of managed services that a lot of places would jump at, or better yet,
technology that would be snapped up in a heartbeat by a lot of existing
managed services vendors.  We just signed on with one that the backend is
Linux based, and has extensive monitoring for Routers, Switches (well, layer
3 and up) and of course Windows and Linux desktops and servers - we're
pretty excited about it, frankly.

I remember seeing something a few years ago that was a similar concept but I
don't think they used any kind of 'rules' based sniffers- it was much more
of an SOA assurance tool, incredibly expensive, as I recall.

-DJ

On 8/15/07, Matt <rosing at peakfive.com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I was mulling over the fact that the worst part of owning a computer
> is updating or modifying the software and hardware. I have a small
> network at home so things aren't that complicated, but it's still a
> time sink for me. Every time I change something or add a feature I
> have to dig around on the internet to figure out how it's done.
>
> At the same time there must be hundreds of thousands of networks that
> are very similar to mine and all of these people have to learn this
> stuff the hard way. Instead, how about using some form of knowledge
> extraction technique that would examine all the configuration files
> across a lot of systems to generate something that could look at a
> specific configuration and let you know how it differs from the
> closest configuration that works? If Bayesian networks are used to
> determine if a message is spam couldn't it be used to determine if,
> say, nfs on a small system is configured correctly? I'm guessing the
> idea in general would work, but I'm wondering about the details. For
> example, I'm guessing that for each type of configuration file there'd
> have to be a description of how to parse it to collect information.
> Also, people would have to decide what configuration information is
> important.
>
> I doubt if something like this would work for any organization that
> hires systems administrators, but could it work for people with small
> systems? Think of the people with no computer knowledge but still have
> a network at home.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Matt
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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