(1) The Arusha airport code. (2) An abbreviation for the Arusha Project as a whole. (3) The name of the Arusha Project "base team", which provides the essential infrastructure for other Arusha teams to build on.

Arusha:

The town in northern Tanzania after which this project is named. (Why?)

assertion:

Every proto-thing (or thing) can have a set of machine-checkable checks associated with it, checks that are `true' if an object is such a thing, and `false' otherwise. We call these checks a thing's assertions (following programmer-speak...).

CM:

See `configuration management'.

configuration management:

We eschew the sysadmin-world definition of `configuration management' (keeping track of hosts, cables, networky things, ...); instead we throw our lot with the world of software configuration management, one definition of which is:

Configuration Management is the process of identifying and defining the items in the system, controlling the change of these items throughout their lifecycle, recording and reporting the status of items and change requests, and verifying the completeness and correctness of items.
-- IEEE-Std-729-1983

There are many other definitions you can choose from!

deploy:

A package is deployed on an individual host by making the bits needed to use that package available, by putting a copy of the bits on the individual host, or by symlinking to a common global copy, or by adding a suitable automount-table entry, or.... See also revealing...

dchunk ("disk chunk"):

(Pronounced `dah-choonk!) An independently-managed chunk of information that sits in one place on one (virtual) disk; see this doc...

ILR:

See Immovable Local Realities.

Immovable Local Realities:

Immovable Local Realities (ILRs) are the main thing that make the sysadmin task distinct from everyday software development. ILRs are the "facts on the ground" of any site... "the only color printer is in the locked cupboard and students can't use it", "Susie won't use a Sun", "tool Z only runs on machine Q", "the license server is tied to host R", and on and on. When you write code to stitch a site together into a seamless whole, you bump into ILRs all the time -- and there's not a thing you can do to make them go away.

ISA:

Instruction Set Architecture: the published specification of the instructions that a particular CPU implements.

It is an important simplifying concept to distinguish between "architecture" (ISA) and "implementation" of a CPU. There are few of the former, many of the latter, and "few" is easier to keep track of. See Brooks and Blauuw for a full treatment of this subject.

package:

A bundled-up piece of sysadmin "added value". Nearly everything in the ARK world comes in a package. Each team does some combination of providing and using packages.

proto-host:

A "prototype host"; a "prototype thing" (proto-thing) specialized to hosts.

proto-thing:

A "prototype thing". Each "thing" in our sysadmin world (hosts [proto-host], users [proto-user], vendors, etc.) is built up by "inheriting" attributes from other "things" -- those things are prototypes. When we name a proto-thing (rather than a "real" thing), we are referring to all the "real" things that inherit from that proto-thing.

reveal:

A package is revealed on an individual host by causing its executables to appear in some location likely to be in a user's PATH. See also deploying...

site:

A team that is really just a collection of machines.

team:

A collection of people and machines who participate in the Arusha Project. If the team is mostly just a collection of machines, then we call it a `site'. An example of a team that is just a collection of people (no machines) would be one where diverse people around the world collaborate on one or more packages, but have no common machines.

value inheritance:

ToDo (hint: the kind we care about)