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Version Control for Important System Files?

Posted by Cliff on from the so-you-can-roll-back-when-things-go-wrong dept.

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?"

5 of 71 comments (clear)

  1. Notepad by Timesprout · · Score: 4, Funny

    What more could you possibly need?

    --
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    What truth?
    There is no dupe
  2. A CVS server by kotj.mf · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    --
    hang brain.
  3. Our system is great by Heir+Of+The+Mess · · Score: 5, Funny

    We have a login script that calls another script that is the one that gets modified. To use different script you just change the name of the called script to the one you want. If the script gets changed then the person who changed it changes the name and we can tell how old it is by the date stamp on the file. So far we have these (oldest to newest):

    sublogin.bat
    sublogn2.bat
    sblg2fix.bat
    latestlg.bat
    newlatst.bat
    finalfix.bat
    reverted.bat
    fixwrked.bat
    NtOnMyPC.bat
    WksOnMyn.bat
    NTONMYPC.bat
    TryThis1.bat

    Seriously though, subversion is good because it lets you do atomic checkins.

    --
    Australian running a company that does C# / C++ / Java / SQL / Python / Mathematica
  4. rcs by pe1chl · · Score: 4, Interesting

    On systems where it matters, I keep config files etc in RCS.
    In each directory where config files live that I want to keep, I create an RCS directory and rcs -i the file(s).
    Nightly, I job runs that finds all files for which an RCS entry exists and that are newer than that entry, and a copy is checked in.

    No need to think about checking in/out all the time, no problem that the RCS seems to believe that you don't want to keep the actual file around.
    It does not save every edit but at least I have a copy of each day's state of the file.

  5. svn trick by bluegreenone · · Score: 4, Informative
    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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