A Need for Change Recording Tool
 

Hello Guys,

We have 5 RHEL System Admin in our firm.All work on tickets raised through OTRS.As of now, there are 50 active Linux Machines with respective projects.
Whenever a ticket is raised, whoever is free will work on the ticket.In course he is sure to make changes which as of now, he will be putting comments on the file with date changes and modified.
Now when a new joinee comes it becomes difficult for him to see what all changes have been made.Say, one of Sysadmin made changes pertaining to JBOSS. So the new joinee maynt have idea what changes made and by whom.

I was thinking to have a Tool which will keep record of what changes have been made and by whom in the system (both system level and application ).

I am not looking for tools for monitoring/filesystem change tracking but a simple GUI kindda stuff where systemadmin after making each changes shall take 5 minutes to update what changes have been made.

Pls Suggest

Why not just set up a database file for keeping record?

You might consider using an internal Wiki to record configurations. You might also look into something like cfengine or puppet with config files stored in a subversion or CVS repository. Thatmight be too heavy-weight for your needs, though. The nice thing about using a wiki is it's easier to see prior versions of a page (just make one page per host and list config changes in there in reverse chronological order). The hard part will likely be making sure all of the admins remember to use the system :).

How gonna I install wiki?

I'm assuming the tickets are held in a database. There is no gui tool for updating all types of tickets on all database systems. You must work with the software being used to make the tickets, or being used to hold the tickets. If people are making changes to the tickets, but no one can see the changes, they aren't really changes. Changes need to be stored somewhere. If data isn't stored somewhere, it isn't really data. Find out where the changes are stored, and when someone wants to look at them, tell them to look there.

The tickets are raised by developers to install/ troubleshoot generally.
In OTRS, we dont store what changes have been made.Just do inform the customer with the updates.
However, there are thousands of tickets lying arbitrary in OTRS..its difficult for someone to go and search what hostname/machine the ticket talks about.

I was thinking of installing Trac which has source code browser plus Wiki too.
So Guys how gonna this work?

There's a lot of wiki software available. I use MediaWiki, but it's not the only one out there. Find one that you like and read the documentation for how to install it (if you're lucky, there might even be RPM packages thatyou can just install). Trac would probably work too; why don't you just get it, read the instructions, install it, and play around a bit?