[CentOS] system config report

[David Miller]

On Tue, Dec 30, 2008 at 7:32 AM, Dag Wieers <dag at centos.org> wrote:
> On Mon, 29 Dec 2008, David Miller wrote:
>
>> Long ago when I was an AIX admin we had a script we ran every 6 months
>> or so and it created what we called the "System Book". It had every
>> possible configuration option. While acknowledging that on a whole it
>> was overkill documentation, if we ever had to rebuild the systems we
>> knew *exactly* how the old one was set up to compare it to if we had
>> problems.
>
> This is funny, we created a similar thing at a previous company I worked.
> It was written in Perl and called sysbook (for System Book). It also
> outputted a "documented" DocBook document that was converted to HTML and
> available to all system engineers.
>
>
>> I'm looking to do something similar for my CentOS boxes. Or better
>> yet, see if someone has already done something similar. I've poked
>> around google and sourceforge on and off for a couple of months but
>> haven't found much. The discussion lately about 'hwinfo' jogged my
>> memory. Anyone know of something like this? A template, even? An old
>> project that hasn't been updated but could be brought up to date?
>
> I wrote "dconf" in memory of the sysbook project. The aim here was not to
> create indexed, human-readable documentation, but rather a file that
> contains all hardware, software and latent configuration. That allows you
> to backup a system's configuration, diff 2 configurations (whether that is
> from 2 different timestamps, or 2 different identical systems is
> irrelevant) and helps comaintaining systems (since it can send changes via
> email or allows to trace back in time when something was modified and by
> whom).
>
> This is perfect for support issues, as you can go back to a customer and
> tell him that you did not leave the system behind like that and point out
> the individual changes they have made to their configuration (even
> hardware changes).
>
> You can find dconf at:
>
>        http://dag.wieers.com/home-made/dconf/
>
> It can use some love of system administrators to complete the database of
> configurations files and commands. I also have less extensive
> configurations file for AIX, Solaris, Debian and SLES that can use some
> love...
>
> --
> --   dag wieers,  dag at centos.org,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
> [Any errors in spelling, tact or fact are transmission errors]
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Thanks - I'll check it out. Looks like sysreport / sosreport will do a
lot of what I'm looking for, but I'm always looking for things like
this. Things that help me sleep better at night.

Our System Book script was written in perl as well, with the output in
LaTeX markup so we could generate a pdf for it as we were the only
UNIX guys in a Windows shop. They were RS/6000 M80s with SSA trays and
boy was that book thick when we printed it out. Ah, the good old
days....

Dave