Does Code Decay? Assessing the Evidence from Change Management Data
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Understanding BGP misconfiguration
Proceedings of the 2002 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications
The cutting EDGE of IP router configuration
ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review
Routing design in operational networks: a look from the inside
Proceedings of the 2004 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications
Minerals: using data mining to detect router misconfigurations
Proceedings of the 2006 SIGCOMM workshop on Mining network data
Detecting BGP configuration faults with static analysis
NSDI'05 Proceedings of the 2nd conference on Symposium on Networked Systems Design & Implementation - Volume 2
Towards automated network management: network operations using dynamic views
Proceedings of the 2007 SIGCOMM workshop on Internet network management
Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution: Research and Practice
Extracting Network-Wide Correlated Changes from Longitudinal Configuration Data
PAM '09 Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Passive and Active Network Measurement
Unraveling the complexity of network management
NSDI'09 Proceedings of the 6th USENIX symposium on Networked systems design and implementation
Configuration management at massive scale: system design and experience
IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications - Special issue on network infrastructure configuration
A toolkit for automating and visualizing VLAN configuration
Proceedings of the 2nd ACM workshop on Assurable and usable security configuration
IP network configuration for intradomain traffic engineering
IEEE Network: The Magazine of Global Internetworking
ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review
Procera: a language for high-level reactive network control
Proceedings of the first workshop on Hot topics in software defined networks
Modeling complexity of enterprise routing design
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Proceedings of the first ACM workshop on Smart energy grid security
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Studying network configuration evolution can improve our understanding of the evolving complexity of networks and can be helpful in making network configuration less error-prone. Unfortunately, the nature of changes that operators make to network configuration is poorly understood. Towards improving our understanding, we examine and analyze five years of router, switch, and firewall configurations from two large campus networks using the logs from version control systems used to store the configurations. We study how network configuration is distributed across different network operations tasks and how the configuration for each task evolves over time, for different types of devices and for different locations in the network. To understand the trends of how configuration evolves over time, we study the extent to which configuration for various tasks are added, modified, or deleted. We also study whether certain devices experience configuration changes more frequently than others, as well as whether configuration changes tend to focus on specific portions of the configuration (or on specific tasks). We also investigate when network operators make configuration changes of various types. Our results concerning configuration changes can help the designers of configuration languages understand which aspects of configuration might be more automated or tested more rigorously and may ultimately help improve configuration languages.