This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Eric Hodel. Original Post: Version Control and Sysadmin Feed Title: Segment7 Feed URL: http://blog.segment7.net/articles.rss Feed Description: Posts about and around Ruby, MetaRuby, ruby2c, ZenTest and work at The Robot Co-op. Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Eric Hodel Latest Posts From Segment7

Every part of the system configuration you change belongs under version control (with a few exceptions). If you’re going to be making changes to your configuration you might do something wrong and need to roll back. You might wonder why or who made a change in the future. Version control will perform CYA duties for you.

There are a few things you probably don’t want under version control. /etc/master.passwd shouldn’t be flying across the wire (and Kerberization or similar works much better for distributing passwords). Sudo will get mad if you go and touch /usr/local/etc/sudoers inappropriately, especially if it has the wrong owners.

Configuration files in /etc, /usr/local/etc, /boot, custom rc.d and periodic scripts, anything you’re going to change, add or even break needs to be under version control. (I haven’t figured out a good way of putting crontabs under version control, ideas?)

For The Robot Co-op, each machine’s configuration is in its own branch in a subversion repository to allow care-free copying of changes between machines. A change to the httpd.conf on one machine is a commit and a couple of merges away from being accurately changed on all the machines. No typos from multiple manual changes.