Questions[etckeeper](server)

I have been reading about etckeeper, but I can't work out if you can use it on any other directories other than /etc.

There seems to be no reference to /etc in any configuration file (that I can find) so I assue this is hard coded and you can't chose directories to monitor. Is this true? I'd like to also have it manage /opt. Can this be done?

I wanted to figure out why, after a etckeeper commit, I had a problem with rebooting (already solved thanks to this great thing).

I played with etckeeper, did git checkout some_commit_sha for a quick look and then git checkout master.

And it seems my file permissions in /etc were broken after those manipulations. All files including ssh_host_rsa_key passwd-, shadow- were rw-r--r--. I didn't know Git does not save file permissions.

Now I fixed all of them (I hope I didn't miss anything).

What was the right way to get earlier states of /etc, look around, and go back to the master with the right file permissions?

Specifically I would like to track my grub.conf (/boot/grub/grub.conf) and some oracle files (i.e. /db/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/db_1/network/admin/tnsnames.ora).

I attempted using links; however etckeeper/git only tracks where the link points to, not the actual contents. And I can not create hard links as the files are on another volume.

I know I could setup another GIT repository but I would rather have it all within etckeeper.

Update

Based on nealmcb's answer I came up with the following script:

#!/bin/sh
set -e

# Based on nealmcb's idea/script from http://serverfault.com/questions/211425/

# If you want other configuration data or files on the system also
# opportunistically tracked via etckeeper, use this script to copy them in.

# If there is a hook of some sort available related to the files
# you're mirroring, you can call etckeeper directly and track them
# proactively, rather than just opportunistically here.

MIRROR_ROOT=/etc/etckeeper.mirror.d
echo "etckeeper: mirroring outside files to $MIRROR_ROOT/:"

mirror_dir() {
   LOCAL_PATH=$1
   echo "  $LOCAL_PATH"
   mkdir -p $MIRROR_ROOT/$LOCAL_PATH
   rsync -a $LOCAL_PATH/ $MIRROR_ROOT/$LOCAL_PATH
}


mirror_dir "/boot/grub"
mirror_dir "/root"  

To add or remove a path you simply add or remove the mirror_dir call at the bottom.

I want to make a central config file repository so that I can have the changes to any config under revision control (Mercurial). This will include some GNU/Linux boxes (which will use etckeeper), the network equipment's config files, printer's config files and last but not least, windows configs.

I know you can import some configurations like ISA's and DHCPs as text/xml files and even shared folders as a registry key, but for stuff like GPOs and AD, IIS, MSSql and others, are there ways to get the configs as flat files? Basically, can you have something somewhat equivalent to etckeeper under windows? Something like some powershell based commands or the like?

Also, can ACLs and other file permissions be preserved under version control (hg)?

BTW, I've already read

• What solutions exist to allow the use of revision control for server configuration files?
• What tool do you recommend to track changes on a Linux/Unix server

to no avail.

I noticed that several people have recommended using etckeeper to apply version control to my /etc directory.

It appears to me that the default install puts a repository on the same machine as the /etc you are trying to manage. This works fine for version control, but doesn't give the added benefit of making an off-server backup of the files - or allow me to duplicate portions of /etc from one source machine to another.

Is it possible to share a single git repository on a central admin machine, so that etckeeper on each server stores its data in the same place?

(I am doing a similar thing now with svn and some custom scripts to commit and revert files, but I have to remember to commit them when I make changes.)