use cronjob to commit /etc/ changes to svn?

Question

I manage a server a lot of people have root access to (I know this is another issue...). I'm working on training them all to request config changes through me but on occasion someone makes a change to a config file without telling someone me.

In the interest of keeping my sanity I was thinking about setting up a cronjob to autocommit the contents of /etc/ to my subversion repository every 5 minutes and email me if there are any changes.

Is there another system available to automatically do this?

I'm not crazy about making my whole /etc/ dir a working copy so I was thinking I would rsync /etc to another dir and then write some shell scripts to automatically add and remove the entries from subversion.

Does this seem like a reasonable thing to do? Is there a better way to handle this situation?

Answer 1

You might want to take a look at etckeeper.

Also see:

• http://serverfault.com/questions/5410/using-revision-control-for-server-configuration-files
• http://serverfault.com/questions/3852/what-tool-do-you-recommend-to-track-changes-on-a-linux-unix-server

Answer 2

Having /etc in svn makes sense, but I hope that your mates at least document what they change, so you could see what was changed in "human-readable" form and also who made the changes.