Networks are error-prone due to misconfigurations, and it is hard to identify the root causes in the configuration and find a repair due to the size and complexity of networks running distributed routing protocols. Thus, we advocate Automatic Configuration Repair (ACR) to reduce the manual effort. Specifically, we draw some insights from the field of Automatic Software Repair (ASR), crystallize some lessons learned from the real-world repair experience of a large service provider, and propose some directions to realize ACR. Inspired by the generate-and-validate approach from ASR, we propose localize-fix-validate as a possible approach to realize ACR.

Network configurations are constantly changing, and each change poses a risk of catastrophic network outages. Consequently, the networking community has put significant effort into developing and optimizing configuration verifiers. However, we observe existing configuration verifiers still have a significant drawback: they are not optimized for configuration changes. That is, they always check a snapshot of network configuration from scratch, even though the configuration often changes slightly since the last verification. In this paper, we demonstrate the benefits, opportunities, and challenges of incremental network configuration verification (INCV). We also demonstrate the feasibility of INCV by introducing RealConfig, an incremental configuration verifier that can check configuration changes within one second.