Mandolin Creek System Helpers

Mandolin Creek Systems developed the Mandolin Creek System Helpers (MCSH) product in order to provide services for Mandolin Creek Farm, Mandolin Creek Lodge, and other new business units in Mandolin Creek Village. From the start, the software design aims to benefit a variety of organizations that need to operate and integrate many independent internet domains, hosts, and services, as our Village requires.

Simple Integration

MCSH integrates the disparate open source systems necessary for a business to scale from startup to enterprise. Independently, those tools allow virtually infinite combinations of adjustable choices and features. The current implementation choices reflect the needs of Mandolin Creek Village business members, but other organizations can benefit from the integration provided by this package. Over time, MCSH can support other choices to meet different tools and workflows.

Simple Choices

The MCSH scripts make most of the implementation choices for you, hiding all of the details behind a consistent set of high-level command languages.

Each tool implements commands that decompose their problem space using simple and straightforward policies. The resulting sequence of commands creates procedures that nearly document themselves. More importantly, they should rank among software industry's best (available) practices. If they aren't, that's a bug!

Collectively, the resulting tools create their own command languages that enable business to implement high-level custom policies and procedures without worrying about the low-level technologies. These custom workflows can collate information from different sources (users, databases, and files), convert generate custom reports and files in many different formats, integrate that output into other documents, and much more.

Simple Tools

Each of the scripts can be used independently from one another to manage individual services, without all of the high-level automation getting in your way. As much as possible, we strictly adhere to the UNIX design philosophy of creating complex commands by connecting together simple commands in new and novel ways. We have rigorous design, implementation, testing, and documentation processes, and we are striving to ensure the system meets their lofty ideals. 

The myriad of simple and complex functions available in each script are presented to the user through an easy to explore command language. This language can be fed to the Mandolin Creek Shell helper script, allowing the MCSH scripts to be combined into total automation solutions that streamline your business processes.

Technical Goals

Altogether, the MCSH package aims to provide a complete, integrated, and easy-to-deploy solution for:

• all internet/intranet domain and paperless office services
• management of physical and virtual servers
• reconfiguration, updates, redeployment, and growth
• content management, archives, backups, testing, and audits
• atomicity, consistency, redundancy, and resiliency
• security and privacy

At least, that is our rough goal for the MCSH v1.0 milestone.