Version Control for Important System Files?

TokyoCrusaders92 asks: "Like a lot of other organizations (800 staff, 5000 students) we have a mix of Windows, Novell & Linux (primarily Linux) for our IT infrastructure. We now have a multitude of config files, firewall rule bases, shell scripts, and so forth which are managed by multiple people and groups. Recently, we started using RCS for version control of the firewall rule-base, but this doesn't seem like it would scale up to larger groups of users. While thinking about this, it would seem that the critical features would include: version control; logging; multiple users; secure authentication; and integrity checking. What are other people using to manage their config files?"

Comments

A CVS server

[kotj.mf]

How similar are your systems? I help manage several thousand distributed boxes that are reasonably identical, and we keep everything in a central CVS server: management scripts, config files, crontabs, what have you. There's no reason it couldn't be used for more heterogeneous systems, other than having to be more careful with file naming conventions.

svn trick

[bluegreenone]

I use subversion (and tortoisesvn as the client) to version my windows system files, in general it works well. There is a trick though. To get a directory under svn control you normally have to import that directory and then rename it so you can checkout an svn'ed copy under the same name. This can be a problem for certain system directories. In this case what you do is :

1. create the dir in the repository but leave it empty
2. checkout that url on the existing dir, since url is empty nothing is overwritten
3. now do an svn add then commit to get everything into the repository

This leaves you with a versioned dir without need for renaming or deletion

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