The Arusha Project home page

ARK gives you a notation to describe your Unix site, and to do so in collaboration with others (if you wish). This woolly description tends to be off-putting to sysadmins who want to download a tarball and do something. So here's one possible `recipe' of Stuff to Do at the beginning of your Arusha adventures:

1. Read a little more, possibly including about ARK's motivations, key ideas, fundamentals, and Deep Coolnesses.

2. Join an ARK mailing list (or two); it's crazy not to! (You can unsubscribe if you decide it's a pain.)

3. Download some ARK bits (by CVS or from SourceForge downloads).

4. Try our test drive setup. It won't break anything. You can do this in your home directory without root permission. (Bootstrapping can be a nuisance, but don't let this put you off.)

5. Once you kinda get the ARK idea, consider building and deploying all of your open-source/freeware software across all of your platforms in the Arusha Way! Start small; grow big...

   The immediate next step is probably to set up ARK `for real' on one or more of your machines.
   Please see the Sidai ARK strategy, for how to set off in that direction.

6. You're cookin' now... Now consider using ARK for more system-y tasks, such as Sendmail configuration, generating and managing your NFS automount maps, doing NISless password distribution (and so on, ad infinitum)...

7. Very important: Keep in touch! Doing Arusha stuff in isolation by yourself is possible, but crazy. If you're shy about piping up on a mailing list, feel free to send private e-mail to one of the developers.

What's sketched above is just one way you might proceed with ARK. There are many ways you might use ARK as part of your system administration. Some small sites now use ARK as their primary system-administration tool. You can start small, and grow from there.

Note: here is ARK's SourceForge project page.