[clug] version control for config files

[jm]

Andrew Janke wrote:
> http://sial.org/howto/cfengine/repository/
>
> Still it does have an evil steep learning curve so I dont blame you
> for skipping it! :)
>
>   

Yeah. that learning curve is a bit of a killer. Are you using cfengine 
any where?

My main concern in to automatically capture any changes made by anyone 
to any configuration file so that the system cannot be by passed either 
by accident or on purpose. I was thinking that if I was to implement it 
I'd use inotify (on linux anyway) to monitor the files of interest and 
when a file was modified and closed a  snapshot would be commited into a 
versioning system.

As an aside I've had inotify monitoring over 1.5 million files on a very 
active mail server using less than 2% cpu.

Searching for inotify and version control drags up alsorts of junk, but 
I did manage to find

  http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/index.cgi/InotifyExtension

which may be worthy of further investigation.


Jeff.