TABLE OF CONTENTS In addition to change management, another important aspect of managing the operations is configuration management. The ability to roll back to a known good configuration or a previous set of values for your systems, network devices, and applications is essential to ensuring that you can recover from unexpected consequences as a result of intended or unintended changes to your environment.
In addition to the Wiki module of eGroupware where you have already seen automatic version control in action, there are a couple of open source version control systems available that can be used to save copies of configuration files and important data:
Concurrent Versions System (CVS) ( https://www.cvshome.org ) CVS is the dominant Open Source, network-transparent version control system that uses a non-exclusive check-out model. Although CVS is typically used for software development, it can also be used to version control any types of files, and is suitable for storing configuration and system data.
Subversion ( http://subversion.tigris.org ) Subversion is meant to be a CVS replacement, so it has most of the CVS features but uses an http/webdav interface for checking files in and out.
The use of the aforementioned tools requires the administrator to check the in/out versions of the files you want to manage. The typical use of a model is to start with a baseline version as the initial check in, and then when a change is necessary, the baseline config is checked...
