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LCFG: Documentation

Overall Documentation

LCFG: A Practical Tool for System Configuration. A SAGE Short topics in System Administration book. This contains the most up-to-date information on LCFG usage.

The Complete Guide to LCFG - This document is intended to be the definitive reference for LCFG. This is now a little out-of-date but still contains a lot of useful information. [bib]

LCFG Build Tools - This is a set of documentation covering a suite of tools which are available to aid the development of LCFG components and software. These documents supercede anything in the "Complete Guide" which covers build tools.

Dynamic Network Configuration with LCFG - An explanation of the LCFG facilities for configuring nodes dynamically for use on different networks. This is published separately since it intended for use by end-users and includes a "quick start" section for using laptops on remote networks. [bib]

DICE and LCFG Software Guidelines - Naming, versioning and other guidelines for DICE and LCFG software. [bib]

Publications

LCFG Users Days were held in 2008, 2009 and 2010 in the University of Edinburgh School of Informatics. Talks were contributed by computing staff from various schools covering the range of uses to which they put LCFG.

Stephen Quinney gave a talk on "System Configuration: An end to hacky scripts?" at the UKUUG Spring Conference 2008, Birmingham, April 1-2 2008. You can view the slides.

A series of virtual workshops were held in Spring 2021. These are an updated version of the ones that have been run previously for a number of years. The aim of these is to provide a good understanding of why we need configuration management and how that can be achieved using LCFG. As well as slides there are recordings for some sessions and exercises which can be worked on using a virtual appliance which provides a self-contained simpl self-hosting LCFG environment.

The University of Edinburgh held a one day tutorial workshop on System Configuration & LCFG on 13 June 2007. This gave attendees a good grounding in LCFG from the people who design and maintain it. Slides, teaching materials and recordings from the workshop are available for download. See the tutorial workshop page for full details.

Paul Anderson and Stephen Quinney gave a talk on "System Configuration" at the UKUUG Spring 2007 Conference in Manchester. You can view Paul's slides and Stephen's slides.

An LCFG workshop was held in Edinburgh University on 20th December 2006, you can view the slides online.

SmartFrog Meets LCFG - Autonomous Reconfiguration with Central Policy Control - Research work from the GridWeaver project which uses a combination of SmartFrog and LCFG to do dynamic reconfiguration. [bib]

LCFG: The Next Generation - The most up-to-date overview of LCFG. For the UKUUG Winter Conference, February 2002. [bib]

Large Scale Linux Configuration with LCFG - from the Atlanta Linux Conference in 2000. A good overview, but somewhat out of date. This update describes the changes between the version described here and the current (ng) version. [bib]

Large Scale Linux Configuration Management - Another reasonable overview, from the May 2000 Linux Journal. Unfortunately requires a Linux Journal subscription for access. [bib]

Towards a High-Level Machine Configuration System by Paul Anderson - The original LCFG paper from the 1994 LISA conference. Now out of date, but a good introduction to the principles. Also published in the book Selected Papers in Network and System Administration, John Wiley. [bib]

Local System Configuration for Syssies (CS-TN-38) by Paul Anderson. This version is dated as October 1996 but it appears to have existed in some form since August 1991, it is referenced by the LISA 8 paper from 1994.

Student Projects

LCFG for Mac OS X - An experimental port of the LCFG core to Mac OS X. Including some Mac-specific components. [bib]

A GUI Interface for LCFG - A simple GUI interface for editing LCFG source files. [bib]

Related Documentation

Node Profile Specification - The specification of the XML node profile developed with the European DataGRID. The current LCFG system uses a subset of this specification. The full specification has not been implemented. [bib]