RoboAdmin: A Different Approach to Remote System Administration

The most widespread approach to system administration consists in connecting to remote servers by means of a client-server protocol. This work analyzes the limitations of such approach, in terms of security and flexibility, and illustrates an alternative solution. The proposed model eliminates the predictable management port on the server by introducing an additional system, placed in between the remote server and its administrator, which allows to devise a management service behaving as a network client instead of a server. While the focus of this work is placed on the alternative communication model, whose effectiveness has been experimentally validated, the resulting architecture can be seen as part of a larger picture, tracing a research path leading to the definition of a novel administration framework, aimed at overcoming many other issues of the current techniques.