To what extent can Version Control help in system administration?

Question

I'm currently tinkering at an OpenBSD system with a view to building myself a firewall and some other bits and bobs.

As this is fairly experimental (I'm an OpenBSD n00b, and I've already trashed my system 3 or 4 times), I wonder what experience others have of making part or all of the file system (I'm thinking in particular of /etc) a working copy of some VCS or other.

• Is this a good idea?

• I'm particularly interested in which VCS people have used for this. I'm considering subversion, bazaar, and git; this won't be a shared repository, so I'm perhaps more interested in the basic vcs functionality than the distributed-or-not argument.

• I'd also like to hear about imagined or actual pitfalls people have found. I can imagine the preservation of file ownership and permissions needs careful thought!

• And, of course, any alternative approaches not involving VCS

Answer 1

Here you have a detailed revision about putting /etc/ under revision control using git.

Another step by step method.

Answer 2

For what you're doing I'd suggest rather than starting from OpenBSD you begin from a distribution where much of the work has already been done like pfsense.

As for the VCS itself you might want to consider mercurial that is being used successfully by these projects