[clug] Putting a server's config under CVS by snarfing /etc

[Michael.James at csiro.au]

Living, as I do, outside the Debian umbrella,
 I'm faced with periodic OS upgrades.

Upgrading tends to leave cruft so I always do clean installs.
At a minimum, I preserve a seperate /home partition
 with a copy of the old /etc/directory in it.

Then comes the nightmare of re-implementing
 all the config changes that defined that machine.

What I want to do is put the whole /etc/ directory under CVS.
(A cron job would take nightly snapshots
 and capture any un-comitted changes.)

That way the nightmare becomes
 a systematic CVS merge operation,
 bringing the old /etc branch back onto the new install.
Then CVS will hold the differences from a stock Suse install
 for system recovery.

Useful also when there are multiple sysadmins,
 (or one absent-minded one).

Anyone played with something like this?
How would CVS cope with the web of links in /etc/init.d?

michaelj

-- 
Michael James				michael.james at csiro.au
System Administrator			voice:	02 6246 5040
CSIRO Bioinformatics Facility	fax:		02 6246 5166