Implementation of delegation in distributed network administration

The paper describes an implementation model for network administration based on the concept of delegation. With delegation, management functions are distributed across the network, as close to the managed resources as possible, and most decisions are taken locally. Development, activation and control of management programs is done remotely from an administration platform. The implementation of the delegation platform is based on the Caml-Light language. Caml-Light is a pragmatic functional programming language. It is enhanced to support remote execution concurrency and management specific libraries. The result is a powerful, yet unobtrusive package to perform efficient and reliable network management tasks. The management applications supported by the delegation mechanism range from the administration of Unix configuration files to more sophisticated usage such as management tasks which monitor resources on a network entity and dynamically takes actions to control such resources