[H-GEN] CVS for /etc management

[Greg Black]

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David Findlay wrote (re-formatted):

| On Mon, 10 Feb 2003 06:07 pm, Greg Black wrote this piece of wisdom:
| > If you need to ask, you don't want to mix CVS and your /etc
| > directory -- learn about it by practising on something much less
| > important to the health of your system and then, if you're wise,
| > decide to forget CVS altogether[1].
| 
| Well I've done a bit with it with source code. What other
| methods of config file control are there? My aims are to be
| able to easily set up heaps of similiar machines(with things
| like IP addresses and hostnames different) and also be able to
| monitor changes and roll back changes. Thanks,

This has already been answered by others, but there are a couple
of points that I haven't seen raised yet.

If it's really a case of "all hosts the same, except for name
and address", then DHCP is the canonical answer -- it's simple
to setup, can be learned in a few minutes from the man pages,
and covers this (and a whole lot more).

Then the rest of the stuff that you want to customise in /etc
and be managed by making a copy of /etc on your /home (or where
you have a partition dedicated to your stuff rather than the OS)
and putting everything under RCS.

The hitch with all semi-automated methods of managing local
configuration stuff in /etc comes when you decide to upgrade
your OS -- OS distributors, whether Linux or BSD variants or any
of the commercial vendors, have a distressing habit of making
gratuitous changes in these parts of their offerings.  That
means that, when you get un upgrade, you have to compare all
the files (or at least the files of interest to you) in /etc
with the ones from the previous release and then make your
patches appropriately.  And then you get to propagate these
changes.

And, as others have pointed out (and this is something that
cannot be stressed enough), you need to be *very* careful about
blundering into some catastrophic error that inhibits net access
to any machines that are not local.

It's the ability to solve these problems successfully that
drives the high salaries of sys admins of large networks :-)

Greg

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