Uno strumento utile per la gestione condivisa di un server è etckeeper. Questo software e’ una collezione di script bash che consentono di tenere sotto controllo tramite un sistema di revisione distribuito la nostra directory /etc/dove sono presenti i file di configurazione della maggior parte dei nostri servizi in Linux. Si potrebbe fare la stessa cosa senza etckeeper appoggiandosi ad un sistema di revisione come darcs o git, ma dobbiamo ricordarci che per questa directory è fondamentale mantenere per ogni file, oltre i permessi anche il proprietario ed il gruppo nonche tutta la struttura di directory comprese quelle vuote. Etckeeper ci aiuta nella gestione automatizzando molti di questi compiti.

Subversion (svn) is an open-source version control system (VCS), used in the development of many software projects. This tutorial shows how to install Subversion on Ubuntu 11.10 and how to configure it to allow access to a repository through different protocols: file://, http://, https://, svn://, and svn+ssh://.

Subversion (svn) is an open-source version control system (VCS), used in the development of many software projects. This tutorial shows how to install Subversion on Debian Squeeze and how to configure it to allow access to a repository through different protocols: file://, http://, https://, svn://, and svn+ssh://.

This tutorial explains how you can store the contents of your /etc directory in a version control system (VCS) with the help of etckeeper on Debian Squeeze. etckeeper hooks into Debian's package manager apt so that whenever you install/remove a package with apt, etckeeper will commit all changes to the /etc directory to your VCS; it also tracks file metadata such as permissions which is important for files such as /etc/shadow. Using etckeeper, you can go back to a previous version of /etc if an update has overwritten valuable configuration files. Not only will etckeeper track apt's changes to /etc, it will also do a daily auto-commit so that your manual changes go to VCS as well; in addition to that, you can do commits at any time manually.

Bazaar is a distributed version control system (VCS) available under the GPL; it is similar to Subversion (svn). Bazaar is sponsored by Canonical, Ltd., the company that develops the Ubuntu Linux distribution, and therefore the Ubuntu project is the most prominent user of Bazaar. This article explains how to set up and use Bazaar on a Debian Etch system, and how to configure an SFTP-/HTTP server to host your Bazaar repository.