My sysadmin toolbox (NewsForge) [LWN.net]

In this edition of the toolbox, Kevin Millman looks at Nagios, CoWiki, Cacti, GNU RCS, apt-cacher, SSL Expire, the blq Realtime Blackhole List (RBL) checker, winbind and more. "We often have situations where the only differences between two machines are the hostname and IP address. It's pointless to go through the building, patching and tweaking to get each box built from scratch. Instead we boot with a good boot CD (Debian From Scratch works well because it supports pretty much everything we use), create the partitions on the new box, mount them, and RSYNC the source machine over."

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RCS vs StGIT

Posted Apr 30, 2006 2:35 UTC (Sun) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]

RCS is very, very obsolete. It works on files rather than on changesets.

I'm using git and StGIT for local development. StGIT allows me to work with different patches doing different things. I can refine every patch, change comments, split parts of the patch to a separate patch. Once I'm satisfied, I can commit my changes. qgit is a very helpful GUI program that fully supports StGIT.

I know Mercurial has mq for patch queue management, but I haven't tried it.

RCS vs StGIT

Posted Apr 30, 2006 17:46 UTC (Sun) by TwoTimeGrime (guest, #11688) [Link]

> RCS is very, very obsolete. It works on files rather than on changesets.

He was talking about managing config files not software development. For version control of config files, such as files at /etc, RCS work great. I've been using RCS for many years to perform version control on my config files. It's convenient because the version history file is stored right in the same directory, with the same filename with ",v" added to the end. I can see quickly in a directory listing what files in /etc have a version history. I also use this method for managing zone files in BIND.

So I find it very not obsolete. It is super simple and works great for my needs and the needs of the author's description in his article.