Improving network reliability by avoiding misconfiguration

One source of network operation interruption is the human factor. In this paper, we discuss how network management systems can help to avoid mistakes in configuration. While ensuring correct syntax of configuration data is nothing novel, testing its semantics has become a challenge to network management. We illustrate possible solutions with the verified network configuration (Verinec) project. A central XML database is used to model the network and device configuration. All configuration is tested before the setup of the real devices is modified.