configuration management tool for Linux

[me at mattgillen.net (Matthew Gillen)]

Jerry Feldman wrote:
> On Thu, 22 Mar 2007 08:26:24 -0400
> "Eugene Gorelik" <eugene.gorelik at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> I wonder if anyone could recommend a decent centralized configuration
>> management tool.
> One thing that was discussed last night at the CBC was using a source
> control system like CVS or Subversion. The procedure would be to set up
> a repository, then import the current values of the files you want to
> maintain centrally. 
> 
> When you want to update one of the files, simply edit the file, and
> check it in to the repository (under CVS: cvs commit). 
> On each system, you could run and update periodically - probably using
> cron.daily. This will pick up the changes. What I would probably do
> would be to create a directory, say in root's home directory, and place
> all the managed config files in there. Then the daily (or hourly)
> script could to the update (eg. cvs update) in that directory, then
> possibly copy the changes to /etc. 
> The advantage of the source control approach is that you have a record
> of your changes, and the changes are imported to each system without
> the system admin person needing to touch all the systems. 
> 
> I can think of a number of different approaches, but using CVS or
> Subversion seems to be a pretty solid approach. 

Another great aspect of this approach is that you can have local modifications
on each server, and they won't get overwritten by an update like they would if
you used rsync (as long as patch(1) can figure out how to merge the changes)

(you just have to be careful about which machine you do commits from...)
Matt

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