AbstractsComputer Science

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 Ocasta to automatically determine which files contain configuration state. Ocasta uses a novel {em similarity} metric to measures how similar a file's versions are to each other, and a set of filters to eliminate non-persistent files from consideration. These two mechanisms enable Ocasta 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. Ocasta 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 manually examine to recover from a misconfiguration.