Master's Thesis: Session Recording in Configuration Management Environments

Abstract ¶

This thesis presents Record Elektra, a session recording tool built on Elektra, designed to streamline the process of applying configuration changes across multiple hosts. Through a case study, we show the the configuration process of an embedded system using Record Elektra, demonstrating the tool's effectiveness in simplifying configuration changes and reducing errors. We also evaluated the performance and memory impact of Record Elektra, finding that it remains within acceptable limits, ensuring minimal disruption to the usage of Elektra.

Our research contributes to the field of configuration management, highlighting the value of session recording in enhancing the configuration process for software services. The study focuses on changes made directly via Elektra, but our approach provides a foundation for extending session recording to monitor changes made to configuration files directly.

Downloads ¶

• Callgrind Callgraph with recording active, 1 million keys
• Callgrind Callgraph with recording inactive, 1 million keys
• Ansible collection package ansible-libelektra. See the Ansible documentation on how to manually install collections.
• Ansible playbooks for setting up the base system
  • play.yaml: The overall wrapper playbook
  • bootstrap.yaml: Bootstrapping the target host by installing Python for use with Ansible
  • install.yaml: Installing Elektra and Opensesame
• Ansible playbooks created by the session recording. Note, that all sensitive values have been replaced by dummy values. Do not try to use them for your own systems. Instead, you can follow the steps outlined in the Thesis to create your own configuration.
  • iteration1.yaml: Result of the first iteration in the case study. Configures /etc/hosts and Opensesame.
  • iteration2.yaml: Result of the second iteration in the case study. Configures the keyboard layout using /etc/default/keyboard.

Debian Repository ¶

We provide a Debian repository for the Elektra and Opensesame packages used by the case study. The packages have been compiled for Debian 11 on armhf on an OLIMEX OLinuXino LIME 2 single board computer. We also provide a mirror of the minimal base system image for the OLinuXino.

If you want to manually use the repository, add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list. Alternatively, you can use the provided Ansible playbooks above to install the base system.

You can then manually install Elektra and Opensesame:

Source code for the binaries: Elektra, Opensesame