MaTRICS: a management tool for the remote intelligent configuration of (pervasive) systems

With MaTRICS, we describe an architecture for pervasive management of distributed systems. It allows remotely connected users (e.g., system administrators) to modify the configuration of any service provided by a specific (application) server, like email-, news- or Web-servers. Novel to our approach is that the system can manage configuration processes on heterogeneous software- and hardware- platforms, which are performed from a variety of peripherals unmatched in today's practice. In this sense, we realize a sort of pervasive system management, where devices like mobile phones, faxes, PDAs are enabled to be used by system managers as remote system configuration and management tools.