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Linux configuration with OpenLMI

Cosmopolitan

Article from ADMIN 37/2017

By Thorsten Scherf

One of the biggest hurdles for prospective Linux administrators is a lack of standards for configuring systems based on different Linux distributions. The Open Linux Management Infrastructure – OpenLMI – is looking to establish and define a standard approach to configuring such systems.

Quickly changing the network configuration on a system should not really be a problem. But how did that work on a Debian system? If you mainly deal with other distributions, you often need to invest a few minutes more for what are actually simple tasks. Seasoned admins will of course have established their own toolboxes over time with useful scripts and tools. Thanks to these toolboxes, most of the routine tasks can be done in next to no time. However, maintaining and improving the toolbox also takes time.

Multiple Distributions

What happens if your employer wants to introduce a new Linux distribution? Will the scripts work the new distribution? Maybe not. You thus need to maintain different versions of a script. Alternatively, the script can be adjusted so that it performs the desired work on different systems. But this costs the admin more time, and because time is a scarce commodity, you might want to look for other solutions.

Furthermore, this approach does not scale very well. Why would anyone want to reinvent the wheel, if we could simply agree on a standard for performing the same work on different systems? In the area of system management, the Open Linux Management Infrastructure (OpenLMI) [1] is trying to define such a standard.

OpenLMI is based on the Common Information Model (CIM) standards. CIM in turn is a Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) component [2], another standard of the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) that is made up of various components (such as CIM) and defines various technologies and methods for unified management of computer systems.

The CIM component describes the typical object classes to be used on a system to be managed (hardware, software, users, and a variety of subsystems) in a kind of schema. CIM determines what an

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