Backing up config files

As systems administrators, we're responsible for maintaining a semblance of consistency across the infrastructure. Obviously, devices across the network will probably not match each other identically, but consistency in this case is more than just identical configurations in multiple cases. It's maintaining a standard documentation profile for every device, in whatever language that device understands. It's also maintaining a consistent backup policy for that configuration, and a record of previous configurations.

By default, not every device keeps records of the old configurations. Almost every device has the ability to save the configuration as a local file, though. Sometimes it's in binary, but usually it's in text. In either case, a subversion repository would be the perfect storage medium. Checking in new configs with notes relating to the changes made are excellent ways to track the configurations of various devices. This also allows you to browse the history of a device's configuration which might be useful if you can't find other sources of documentation (When did we get that Qwest line again? No, the one before this one).

Thanks to the flexibility of svn, testing configurations is a breeze with branches available for testing. Connecting an svn repository with a tftp server would allow for excellent flexibility in remote configuration of devices. Set up correctly, it can also manage host configurations without much effort.

It would also be a good way to store public certificates. Distributing the cert to all the machines that needed it in a web cluster would be much easier that way.

Anyway, I suspect that subversion holds a lot of promise as a systems administration tool. At some point, I'm going to investigate it further, and I'll post the results on this blog.