System Programming of Tools and Applications - Term Paper Example

 System Programming of Tools and Applications Abstract This research is aimed at proving a hypothesis “with the improvements in the tools provided with or available for modern operating systems, the need to write scripts to assist in administering or investigating computer systems has been significantly reduced or even eliminated”. In this paper, I would give arguments to prove that we still want new scripts and programming applications because the tools and applications provided by an operating system cannot be used to perform every kind of job. There are many tasks which require writing and running new scripts and codes. This paper discusses the arguments of various researchers to prove this hypothesis. Introduction Without a doubt, at the present, operating systems come with a wide variety of tools and applications which have been more and more improved with the passage of time so the need to write scripts to assist in performing tasks and operations on computer systems has been significantly reduced. However, it has not been eliminated. In fact, there are still a wide variety of tasks and activities which cannot be completed until we develop or write a new code or script for the computer system. For instance what if you are not using computer and we are outside the office and we want an application or script which allows us to perform the same operations while staying far from our office and there are so many other similar cases where we need to develop innovative scripts. Though, an operating system comes with the entire functionality and its tools and applications are continuously improving with the passage of time but there are still many things missing. This paper will discuss this hypothesis in detail and will show that there are still numerous tasks which can only be performed by writing new scripts using latest programming applications. Discussion One of the well-known operating systems is the Windows operating system, which offers a solid foundation for all of the workload and application needs at the same time as being straightforward to install and administer. Additionally, most recent Virtualization tools, management improvements, Web resources, and thrilling Windows integration help minimize expenditures save time, and offer a platform for a dynamic and competently managed data center (Microsoft Corporation, 2012). One of the primary objectives of any operating system is to provide its users with an easy and fair access to computing and communication resources through the applications that will execute on top of it. Hence, in an attempt to accomplish similar results, various operating systems offer a wide variety of policies for assigning resources to, as well as sharing resources among tools and applications. It also puts into operation security measures to offer security against bad or defective applications. On the other hand, for the majority of these distributions and sharing activities, none of the operating systems offer any best possible policy. In fact, different tools require different operating system measures and strategies to accomplish their objectives in the most favorable mode. In this scenario, various researchers purpose the use of a customizable or flexible operating system to offer adaptable methods and procedures to its users, with the intention that they can accomplish their tasks in a best possible way. Without a doubt, the major clients of an operating system are the tools and applications, however also application administrators and developers (Denys et al., 2002; Walpole et al., 1995; Engler et al., 1995). In addition, the need to adopt customizability depends on the context of different goals. In many cases, the users of an operating system want maximum performance, which can be the driver for writing new scripts for general-purpose operating systems. In the same way, for embedded operating systems, the software footprint or minimum power utilization can be the key driver. In view of the fact that when an operating system is installed to support a number of users, contradictory needs and requirements are expected to happen. Hence, to adapt gracefully to these conflicting needs there is need to make the system customizable. A number of researches show that the customizability (or adaptability) has always been a key concern for operating system programmers. They could never find the ways to fulfill all the changing requirements effectively. Though, the earlier operating systems offered a little support for customization, often at some point in the system generation phase. On the other hand, in the past few years, customizability has turned out to be a key area of research in operating system, as well as a wide variety of tools and methods have been discovered and developed to accomplish build-time, installation-time and even run-time customizability. Despite the fact that completing a project that required an instant customizable protocol stack, and as a result exploring the literature on customizability, the developers and researchers came to know that the range of tools and methods made the literature fairly out-of-the-way, and delayed a rapid distribution of results (Denys et al., 2002; Walpole et al., 1995; Engler et al., 1995). In the past few years, advancements and developments in information technology have made a collection of workstation class computers. These computers are built for commercial purposes and cost-effective platforms that have the capability to support a wide variety of tools and allow completing different tasks. In this scenario, advancements in computing and communication control, lower per unit price and the extensive accessibility of Linux as a free, user-friendly, and almost standard operating system, make high-end computing with these systems easy to get to both to a broader developer base as well as to a wide variety of users. Additionally, as a result of these advancements, Linux operating system came into view as a just about ubiquitous, open-source operating system with a large number of voluntarily accessible dedicated libraries and programming support tools. Moreover, different operating systems are used or customized for different purposes. For instance, the Linux operating system is presently considered as the best possible system in educational and manufacturing systematic computing environments and consequently, numerous, unless a number of, scientific programmers are being educated and trained nowadays acquainted with Linux as a development platform. On the other hand, a major restriction to the use of this operating system for high-end cluster computing still is its possible performance effect on application execution. In view of the fact that Linux, similar to other commonly used operating systems with commercial application, carries on to develop to offer support for a wide variety of user preferences and requirements, devices an application domain (all other machines varying from supercomputers to handheld). With the passage of time, its reputation as a web server hosting platform has placed even larger pressure and demands on its capability to offer support in the form of rapid response times for many challenging small, comparatively transitory, and potentially hard to calculate computations (for instance web transactions). On the other hand, technical applications running in clustered environments are often very large, long-running; resource concentrated and makes use of space-sharing to increase limited access to the devices and systems they access through a batch system. In addition, they do not fight enthusiastically for hiring I/O and processor resources for the reason that the batch system makes sure that any processors assigned to an application are not used or shared by any other applications (Krintz & Wolski, 2005; Denys et al., 2002). In the past few years, new technology based automated tools and solutions have offered even more assistance when it comes to automating the overall system administration process. In this scenario, both the open source and commercial technology based tools are accessible to carry out more automated system administration and workflow management and processing. Additionally, a number of new automated solutions basically focus on automating the post and pre stages around call or execution of the scripts, as others go beyond the post and pre administration script handling and processing and drive down into improving the real linker and compile calls without a great deal manual scripting. These systems and tools are mainly helpful for continual integration of technology based management where the common script calls to the compile procedures are necessary and incremental build processing is desirable (Noel, 2005; Partington, 2010; TechRepublic, 2012). Though, operating systems contain a wide variety of tools and applications that can be used to complete daily tasks and operations but there is still need for additional scripts to complete various tasks. In this scenario, a large number of tools and scripting technologies have been developed to facilitate software developers to improve the capabilities of their operating system. For instance, for the development of automated services for the sake of effective management there are a number of services and supporting features offered by VMware Scripting APIs. Additionally, using these VMware scripting APIs we are able to create our own custom scripts to manage our ESX servers; we have to install the VMware Scripting APIs on the terminal or a server where our scripts will execute. The APIs are accessible free of cost from VMware at:www.vmware.com/support/developer/scripting_download.html. We have to log in to the website using VMware store account details and agree to the license agreement. After that we can access the download links for different API. There are different APIs for different operating systems as listed below: (TechRepublic, 2012; IBM, 2010) COM API for Windows Perl API for Windows Perl API for Linux There is another important tool for creating scripts known as Windows PowerShell. It is a latest command line shell and scripting programming language platform that is developed for system management and automation. This platform is based on the new technology based Microsoft .NET Framework, which facilitates information technology experts and developers to automate and control the management of applications in an operating system. Additionally, Windows PowerShell II as well offers a hosting method through which the Windows PowerShell run times can be entrenched in other systems. These systems are able to then make use of Windows PowerShell new technology based functionality to apply certain processes, comprising those which are demonstrated using the enhanced graphical interface. In addition, this feature has been used by Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 to represent its administrative processes and functionality like PowerShell cmdlets and providers and apply the graphical management systems as PowerShell hosts that issues essential cmdlets. In fact, various other Microsoft systems such as Microsoft SQL Server 2008 as well represent their running interface through PowerShell cmdlets. Moreover, through PowerShell, graphical interface supported administration applications on Windows are covered on top of new technology based Windows PowerShell. A PowerShell new programming scripting interface for Windows systems is authorized by the Common Engineering Criteria (Microsoft, 2012; Newton, 2010). Furthermore, there are numerous scripts which have been written in different scripting languages to ease the processing of a certain process. For instance, Software Licensing API can be used to determine a real Microsoft Windows installation, log and install an asset management license, and recover data regarding the licensing policy of an application component. In the same way, the system restores automatically capability also offers a great deal of capability to monitor and record major application transformations on a client's system. Basically, it is intended to decrease support costs and augment client satisfaction by facilitating a client to undo a modification that can cause an issue with the system, or relapse to a day when the application was carried out optimally (Microsoft, 2012). Moreover, Windows Deployment Services (WDS) are used to automate the modified version of Remote Installation Services. Basically, the WDS offers an excellent support while deploying Windows operating systems. We are able to make use of WDS to set a new user through a network-based installation without requiring from managers to visit every computer or apply new services install directly from CD or DVD media. The automated Windows Remote Management (or WinRM) is the Microsoft’s implementation of technology based arrangement of WS-Management protocol, a customary Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) supported firewall-friendly protocol that permits OS and hardware, as of diverse vendors, to implement (Microsoft, 2012). Conclusion Without a doubt, an operating system is necessary to use the computer. An operating system offers a wide variety of software tools to carry out different kinds of task. Though, an operating system incorporates all the necessary tools and functionalities that are necessary to complete various jobs but not all the jobs can be performed using the same tools and applications. We always need for the new tools and scripts for completing certain tasks. This paper has presented a detailed analysis of the tasks that operating systems can perform. Without a doubt, current operating systems contain high quality tools and applications but they cannot eliminate the need to write scripts for the new applications. References Denys, G., Piessens, F. & Matthijs, F., 2002. A survey of customizability in operating systems research. ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), 34(4), pp.450-68. Engler, D.R., Kaashoek, M.F. & O'Toole, J., 1995. Exokernel: an operating system architecture for application-level resource management. ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, 29(5), pp.251-66. IBM, 2010. Administrator's and User's Guide. [Online] Available at: http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/tivihelp/v3r1/topic/com.ibm.samp.doc_3.2/HALBAU20.pdf [Accessed 10 November 2012]. Krintz, C. & Wolski, R., 2005. Using Phase Behavior in Scientific Application to Guide Linux Operating System Customization. In IPDPS '05 Proceedings of the 19th IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS'05) - Workshop 10 - Volume 11., 2005. IEEE Computer Society Washington, DC, USA. Microsoft Corporation, 2012. Operating Systems. [Online] Available at: http://www.microsoft.com/servers/en/us/default.aspx [Accessed 10 November 2012]. Microsoft, 2012. System Administration (Windows). [Online] Available at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/hh309472(v=vs.85).aspx [Accessed 10 November 2012]. Microsoft, 2012. Windows Management Framework (Windows PowerShell 2.0, WinRM 2.0, and BITS 4.0). [Online] Available at: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968929 [Accessed 10 November 2012]. Newton, T., 2010. What’s new in Windows PowerShell 2.0. [Online] Available at: http://blogs.technet.com/b/askperf/archive/2010/01/26/what-s-new-in-windows-powershell-2-0.aspx [Accessed 11 November 2012]. Noel, 2005. The Quest for the Perfect Build System. [Online] Available at: http://gamesfromwithin.com/the-quest-for-the-perfect-build-system [Accessed 10 November 2012]. Partington, V., 2010. Deployment Automation vs. Build Automation. [Online] Available at: http://java.dzone.com/articles/deployment-automation-vs-build [Accessed 10 November 2012]. TechRepublic, 2012. Scripting and Programming for the Virtual Infrastructure. [Online] Available at: http://i.techrepublic.com.com/downloads/home/1597490598_chapter_3.pdf?tag=mantle_skin;content [Accessed 12 November 2012]. Walpole, J. et al., 1995. Customizable Operating Systems. [Online] Available at: http://reference.kfupm.edu.sa/content/c/u/customizable_operating_systems__2844059.pdf [Accessed 10 November 2012]. Read More