Debian Administration

Someone once suggested this, and it seemed like a good idea the time, but I've never got round to trying it out. I do however back up /etc...

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"It's Not Magic, It's Work"
Adam

I do not store them under revision control. But what I do is have a regular backup of /etc and if I change any file say xorg.conf I store this as xorg.conf_yymmdd in some directory. It is not as efficient as version control but it serves the purpose as /etc files are usually text and I only edit just couple of them (sources.lost, fstab, xorg.conf) .

i cvs most of my rc files in my home dir, this way i can check them out on remote machines and when i am done, i just use an alias to remove all the checked out files. the only problem is that i have is some config files dont work on multi machines, like i have diff .conkyrc for desktop and laptop and i dont like .conkyrc.`hostname` format

Does anyone have some URLs on how to best set this up?

Hello

does anyone know an solution of using a rcs like svn, but without having the .svn directorys everywhere in /etc?

greetings
Anton

I think it would better to store /etc on a Versioning File System (like VMS have) and make regular backup.
Are there any well tested Versioning File System under Linux?

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László Kiss

I use RCS on files outside of etc that I sometimes change several time a day (/usr/local/apache/conf), but for /etc I have a script in cron.daily that backs up /etc and keeps several revisions. I'm not the original author, but have modified to handle links and such. I can't remember where I found it. It requites the 'savelogs' script from debianutils. Here it is:

#!/bin/sh
#
# Save a copy of any file in /etc that has been changed.
# To be run daily from via cron
# RGB
#

#ert -x                  # Trace
#set -e                  # Exit on error

SRCDIR=/etc
DESTDIR=/var/local/etcBackup
CYCLES=10

/usr/bin/test -d $DESTDIR || mkdir -p -m755 $DESTDIR
cd $DESTDIR


for file in `/usr/bin/find $SRCDIR \(  -type f -o -type l \)`; do
    # Exceptions. Do not backup
    case $file in
        *~) /bin/rm $file; continue;;
        /etc/modules.conf.old) continue;;
        /etc/.serial.conf.old) continue;;
        /etc/sgml/*.old) continue;;
        /etc/webmin/webmin.acl.bak) continue;;
        *bak|*.dpkg*|*.old) echo "Check $file"; continue;;
        /etc/ld.so.cache|/etc/mtab|/etc/adjtime) continue;;
    esac

    # do nothing if file is empty
    test -s $file || continue

    if [ -e ./$file ]; then
        /usr/bin/cmp -s $file ./$file && continue
        /usr/bin/savelog -p -c $CYCLES ./$file >/dev/null
    else
        dir=`/usr/bin/dirname $file`
        test -d ./$dir || mkdir -p ./$dir
    fi
    /bin/cp -dp $file ./$file
done

Talking about revision control, does anyone here know how to have "custom" keyword tags in subversion?

I'm not sure if it's even possible, but from working with FreeBSD quite alot lately, I've noticed that alot of the system config files have what look like RCS style keywords, but with a $FreeBSD: $ tag rather than something more common like $Id: $.

I'd really like to have subversion do something similar, but using a format like $hostname: $ so that an "Id" style tag wouldn't overwrite the actual package release version that's often also in config files.

Anyone know how I might achieve this, or have any links?

Cheers.

I do not make mistakes on my PC :P