Config4GNU's WBEM/CIM related projects

The Config4GNU project is about finding and creating ways to unify and simplify management of configuration on GNU/Linux systems. The Config4GNU website contains lots of information about an XML-based approach to configuration management. This is not in sync with what I've personally been working on, which is using the DMTF-defined WBEM and CIM standards to manage configuration data. Read on to find out more.

A seperate page has been created for my WBEM-related work at http://jason.long.name/config4gnu-wbem/index.html. It is my intention to move the contents of those pages to Config4GNU's main web site but I haven't gotten around to it yet. This page contains some general information on WBEM which may be helpful, as well as links to the actual standards themselves.

There are three parts to the WBEM part of the Config4GNU project.

First, Config4GNU is creating a Configuration Console application (currently named CIMBrowser) that can read and manipulate CIM data. This console supports plugins, which can extend the user interface for specific configuration tasks. There are screenshots of this console in action at http://jason.long.name/config4gnu-wbem/screenshots.html.

The second part is modeling configuration data for various applications to the Common Information Model (CIM). As far as I know, most configuration data found on Linux has not been modeled to CIM. This means there is a lot of work to do. Where configuration data has already been modeled, Config4GNU should do its best to standardize on existing work. Where it hasn't, Config4GNU will need to do the modeling work. It should be done in as open a way as possible, and others should be encouraged to use Config4GNU's models.

The third part is writing providers. These providers work with a WBEM server to translate between the standardized CIM model and the actual configuration data found on a system. Config4GNU providers are written in Perl, and currently only work with the OpenWBEM server.

If you want to give all this a try, follow the instructions in the Docs section of Config4GNU's project page:
http://sourceforge.net/docman/?group_id=62306.