Baseliners

If you install a system it's foolish to think you'll be the only person ever working on it.  that means that you need to be aware of what other people doing with the system. That's were baseliners can help: if you have a snapshot of the system when the last time you worked on the server it is easier to understand what was changed after that (and sometimes, why ;-).

SUSE system information

• Boot log information (/var/log/boot.msg)
• Hardware information (using /proc/, hwinfo, hdparm, fdisk, iostat, lspci, and siga)
• Hardware driver information (hwinfo)
• System and process information (using top, uptime, ps. netstat, uname, KDE System Guard, and Xosview)
• Configure the syslog daemon (syslog.conf) to schedule logged event

Old News ;-)

confstore

A configuration backup utility that makes backups of configuration.

Confstore is a configuration backup utility. It scans a system for all recognised configuration files and then stores them in a simple archive. It knows what to scan for by reading a definitions file. Confstore can also restore configuration from backup archives it has previously created.

rsnapshot

Written in Perl

rsnapshot is a filesystem snapshot utility based on rsync. It makes it easy to make periodic snapshots of local machines, and remote machines over ssh. It uses hard links whenever possible, to greatly reduce the disk space required.

Perl Snapshot Is Not Incremental Backup

Perl Snapshot Is Not Incremental Backup backs up Samba (or Microsoft Windows) shares to central disk space using LinNeighborhood mount scripts as configuration files. The disk space is organized into multiple directories named after the server, share, and date. Each dated directory contains a snapshot of all the files on the exported share on the particular date. Disk usage is reduced by using hardlinks to keep multiple full copies of files available.

afick

afick is another file integrity checker, designed to be fast and fully portable between Unix and Windows platforms. It works by first creating a database that represents a snapshot of the most essential parts of your computer system. You can then run the script to discover all modifications made since the snapshot was taken (i.e. files added, changed, or removed). The configuration syntax is very close to that of aide or tripwire, and a graphical interface is provided.

System Configuration Collector

Both client and server written in shell

System Configuration Collector (SCC) is yet another configuration collector. It consists of a client and a server part. The client collects configuration data in a structured snapshot, compares the new snapshot with the previous one, and adds differences to a logbook. Then the snapshot and the logbook are converted to HTML for local inspection. Optionally, the data can be sent to a system running the server software. On the server, summaries of the data are generated, and search/compare operations on the snapshots and logbooks are available via a Web interface.

freshmeat.net Project details for Dconf

Python-based

Dconf is a tool to collect a system's hardware and software configuration. It allows you to take your system configuration with you and compare systems (like nodes in a cluster) to troubleshoot hardware or software problems. It can also be configured to send out configuration changes at given intervals to a group of people, or store a new snapshot when system changes happen.

freshmeat.net Project details for Sysinfo

Sysinfo is a script-based utility to retrieve, display, and save various system information like hardware, system configuration information, user information, and network information. In a Linux system, the various system information is scattered in different parts of the system without any single command line tool to display all the information. Sysinfo is a single tool to display this information. The displayed information can be easily interpreted even by a novice.

All this little script does is automatically generate some specs on a system. Unfortunately it's a little too specific for RedHat, but it could easily be modified to work under Debian or SuSE. My hunch is that it will work without modification on Caldera or TurboLinux. It's written in bash since the file tests / manipulation tends to make it well suited for the task. The output is in HTML. This script won't and can't do a lot of things. It'll probably never be a "1.0" release since I know I'm not going to work on this much.

Caldera 1.1 used to ship with a nice tool that analyzed the system and reported information like this. I liked the tool, but I was never able to get it to work properly on new releases. It also had a lot of shortcomings. So I initially wrote this script to give me barebones info on a Red Hat system since I noticed there were over a dozen machines that needed documenting. Real systems administrators spend days writing script rather than actual documents. The current incarnation of the script is my initial hour or so of work (from 1997) and a morning of additions I just did. The information I'm collecting is the bare essentials I want to know about a system. I have another little perl script that will automagically go out and download files like sendmail.cw and bind db.*. With these two tools I can pretty much rebuild a Linux server.

I have a sample output file. The info you'll get will contain:

• CPU / memory / OS version
• I/O addresses in use
• Interrupts in use
• PCI / SCSI /RAID devices
• df / ifconfig / netstat output
• lilo.conf
• inetd / rc.3d services listed
• Samba shares
• lpd queues

freshmeat.net Project details for sysinfo.sh

sysinfo.sh automatically generates some specs about a Linux system. It's a little too specific to RedHat, but it could easily be modified to work under Debian or SuSE. The output is in HTML. Information gathered includes hardware specs, samba config, inet services, printers, etc.

Novell SUSE LINUX 10.1 siga

SIGA stands for System Information GAthering. It collects various
system information and outputs it in HTML or ASCII format. Since it
needs root permissions, you will be asked for the root password. It is
very handy as an information source during installation support phone
calls.

siga-10.101-32.noarch RPM

Cool Solutions M-Backup

M-Backup is a tool for making backup of important system files and other important system information. There are many important files that are scattered over the system which needs to be regularly backed up. Keeping track of all these files is quite painful.

M-Backup is a command line tool that will backup all these files. System administrators can add more files to the list of files that needs to be backed up according to needs.

M-Backup can even be used for inventory purpose, for keeping record of various configuration information.

Run by simply issuing the command ./mbackup.sh after logging in as root. It will create a directory MBackup under root's home directory and store the various system information. It will also create a log file that will list all the files and other information that was saved. If mbackup is added in crontab, it can do the jobs automatically.