30 years of LCFG?!

I was recently digging into the history of LCFG to find out a little more about its origins and what inspired its creation…

Much of what we recognise as LCFG today is described in a paper – Towards a High-Level Machine Configuration System – that Paul Anderson presented to the Usenix LISA 8 conference in 1994. Whilst scanning through the references I spotted an entry for another article written by Paul in August 1991 – Local System Configuration for Syssies. Initially, I couldn’t find it anywhere online but after a bit of serious detective work, I found a copy from 1996 buried in a dusty cobwebbed corner of our filesystems. Firstly what I realised was this makes LCFG 30 years old!

Reading through the two articles I was struck by how little the challenges we face as system administrators have changed. The LISA paper lists a number of problems we need to overcome, in summary:

Install procedures only cover vendor-supplied software
The interface to procedures is often a non-automatable GUI
Procedures are incomplete and require hand-editing of configuration files
Configuration is stored on the machine itself and thus must be re-entered whenever it is reinstalled
Procedures are highly vendor-specific and not appropriate for a heterogeneous environment

It goes on to note “it is intended that the system [LCFG] be portable, presenting a uniform interface to the configuration process across different platforms“.

30 years on LCFG continues to enable administrators to overcome these issues. In particular, it deals especially well with the challenges of heterogeneous networks. Right now we’re using it to provide a standard interface for the configuration of both Scientific Linux 7 and Ubuntu Focal environments. In the past, it has handled Solaris, MacOSX, and a variety of Redhat derivatives.

Later in the LISA paper it notes – “Hopefully, standards will develop, and become adopted, so that multiple vendors can construct objects which inter-operate across heterogeneous systems“. Frustratingly, 27 years later we’re still hoping for a day when big Linux vendors, such as Redhat and Canonical, get together to create a common, standard way of configuring their systems!