Balancing Zero-Adminand Incremental Integration

in Real-World Ubicomp Environments

Andy SzybalskiAdviser: Armando Fox

25 May 2004

2/10

Stanford iRoom

• Conference room augmented with:– 3 SmartBoard displays– wireless input and

output devices– custom software

infrastructureand applications (iROS)

• Facilitates collaborative work

QuickTime™ and aTIFF (LZW) decompressor

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3/10

iROS• Incremental integration: applications communicate

indirectly through Event Heap– Minimizes effort of integration associated with adding

new applications to the environment• Difficult to recover from hardware and software failures

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PointRight for Win

Event Heapserver

PointRight for Mac

MultiBrowseSender

MultiBrowseRec’ve

r

MultiBrowseSender

MultiBrowseRec’ve

r

OpenURL(www.stanford.edu) OpenURL(www.stanford.edu)

X

4/10

Zero-Admin

1. recoverability from transient hardware and software failures

2. configuration minimal and centralized3. installation can be done quickly and

easily to integrated new machines into the environment

4. boundaries of interaction clearly defined– All applications on a machine

connected or disconnected– One Event Heap per room

without increasing effort of integration

5/10

iROS Manager

• iROS Manager is a daemon that controls starting, monitoring, and stopping of applications in a ubicomp environment

• Must be flexible enough to accommodate arbitrary applications– takes advantage of universal mechanisms

QuickTime™ and aTIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor

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QuickTime™ and aTIFF (LZW) decompressorare needed to see this picture.

iROS Manager iROS Manager iROS Manager

Mac

app

Java

app

Winapp

Java

app

Event Heapserver

6/10

Recoverability

• Restartability: if an application stops functioning, iROS Manager kills its process and restarts it.

• Monitoring: how to tell if an application is functioning properly– default: process alive– custom Event Heap monitor:

ping• Uses universal mechanisms, but:

– applications must be restartable

iROS Manager

Javaapplicatio

n

Event Heapserver

default monitor

Event Heap monitor

PingEvent()

7/10

Configuration• Global settings across all applications• In addition, each application must be

accompanied by a config.ini file specifying how it should be run:

APPLICATION = java MultiBrowseService ${MACHINE_NAME} ${EHEAP_SERVER}

• Someone must write these config.ini files

8/10

Zero-Admin

1. recoverability from transient hardware and software failures

2. configuration minimal and centralized3. installation can be done quickly and

easily to integrated new machines into the environment

4. boundaries of interaction clearly defined– All applications on a machine connected

or disconnected– One Event Heap per room

mostly without increasing effort of integration

9/10

Success Story: TeamSpace

• Model for a public zero-admin interactive workspace– Deployed in Meyer

Library• TeamSpace client

installation with iROS Manager, PointRight, MultiBrowse

• Simple GUI foriROS Manager

10/10

TeamSpace GUI

• Event Heap server preset to teamspace.stanford.edu

• Connected to Event Heap iff application is open

• Very few code modifications needed: – Integrated MultiBrowse

sender functionality into GUI

– Made PointRight non-configurable

– Nomenclature

11/10

Conclusions

• Future work– restartability using dependencies– global configuration across multiple machines

• It is possible to create a unified, zero-admin environment from a heterogeneous set of software

• Balance between zero-admin and incremental integration

Andy Szybalskiandys@cs.stanford.edu

12/10

Menu GUI

13/10

Launcher GUI

14/10

Installer

15/10

Patch Panel