OpenSource Change Management System?

[Dag Wieers]

On Tue, 23 Jan 2007, Shane Presley wrote:

> Is anyone aware of any open source tools for change management?
> Actually my needs are pretty simple...a web based tool to keep a log
> of changes made to a system.  I don't need approval or scheduling
> functions.  Just a log so I can look back over the changes made to a
> system on certain days.

I'm interested in something simple as well for configuration management. 
Most systems I've seen seem overly complex and are often harder than 
using RPM packages for this purpose and manual configuring/pushing from 
eg. subversion.

What may be of interest to you is a different approach I've taken to have 
control over changes on a system. The tool I wrote is called dconf:

	http://dag.wieers.com/home-made/dconf/

It allows you to make a snapshot of the system at any time (like eg. 
hourly, daily or weekly) and then look for the differences between 2 dates 
(eg. between last week and now).

Dconf makes a snapshot of both the software configuration and hardware 
configuration as well as latent in-memory configuration (eg. loaded 
routing tables or active setups).

It also allows to mail out changes whenever it is scheduled to run (if 
any). This makes it useful for systems that are maintained by a group of 
people.

This offers some of the advantages as configuration management (eg. for 
troubleshooting) but makes it harder to attribute changes to a person as a 
real configuration management tool would give.

On the other hand, apart from the custom definitions (contributions are 
welcome), the tool is simple to set up. Install the package and run the 
tool.

I'm interested to receive feedback/suggestions regarding dconf.

Kind regards,
--   dag wieers,  dag at wieers.com,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[all I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power]