The Arusha Project provides a framework for collaborative Unix system administration; as such, we hope there will eventually be a lot of people behind it!

The initial core developers are a group of people linked to the Computing Science Department, Glasgow University, in Scotland.

Will Partain (one of the above) started the project, so he got to name it. He once lived in Arusha, and the rest is history :-)

How does Arusha Project collaboration work?

ARK collaboration works by sysadmin "teams" making some of their "added value" available to others, typically as "packages". A team then assembles their own solutions from all of the available material, including their own and including tweaks they've made to others' stuff.

The core developers "control" the base team, `ARK', which provides the core code that all Arusha teams will build on.

`ARK' is a mechanism-not-policy team. We (the core developers) also have a separate how-we-think-you-should-do-it (policy) team, called `Sidai'. For example, we think most people should use a "hubs-and-clients" sendmail configuration package.

If our Sidai team had made such a sendmail configuration package, you could use it, or not. Maybe you prefer qmail. Maybe you think we've fluffed the sendmail configuration. Maybe you want to make one of your own. You can offer yours "in competition" to our configuration.

A lot of people communication will be required for this process. Certain teams will have a particular "angle" on doing things, and perhaps develop a following (or the opposite :-). The ARK mailing lists can be used for these discussions.

We hope there will be a process of "commoning up" of packages and even of whole teams. "Our Amanda configurations are nearly the same; why don't we get together and make a single glorious (parameterised) config..."

All in all, separate Arusha sites could be very different, with wildly varying approaches to doing things. The Arusha Project provides a "language" in which all of these choices may be systematically expressed and compared. We think that's a big step forward.