SAIC: Identifying Configuration Files for System Configuration Management

Abstract: Systems can become misconfigured for a variety of reasons such as operator errors or buggy patches. When a misconfiguration is discovered, usually the first order of business is to restore availability, often by undoing the misconfiguration. To simplify this task, we propose the Statistical Analysis for Identifying Configuration Files (SAIC), which analyzes how the contents of a file changes over time to automatically determine which files contain configuration state. In this way, SAIC reduces the number of files a user must manually examine during recovery and allows versioning file systems to make more efficient use of their versioning storage. The two key insights that enable SAIC to identify configuration files are that configuration state must persist across executions of an application and that configuration state changes at a slower rate than other types of application state. SAIC applies these insights through a set of filters, which eliminate non-persistent files from consideration, and a novel similarity metric, which measures how similar a file's versions are to each other. Together, these two mechanisms enable SAIC to identify all 72 configuration files out of 2363 versioned files from 6 common applications in two user traces, while mistaking only 33 non-configuration files as configuration files, which allows a versioning file system to eliminate roughly 66% of non-configuration file versions from its logs, thus reducing the number of file versions that a user must try to recover from a misconfiguration.