Managing configuration file changes during RHEL release updates

[Rwac]

How do you manage configuration changes during your RHEL upgrades? I have only had to upgrade individual systems on an ad-hoc basis in the past and have simply searched for *.rpmnew files to ascertain if there are any important changes.

How would you go about managing these upgrades for larger environments (e.g. 20 servers from 5.2 -> 5.4) ? I am unable to go for configuration management tools like puppet that install agents on the servers.

 

[Rwac]

yep if you get .rpmnew files etc

 

[Rwac]

I just do a diff between blabla.conf.rpmnew and blabla.conf to see if there are any big changes.

This is what I do currently.

We will be rolling it through a testbox -> test environment -> onwards, I was just wondering if there was something a bit more elegant.

I might look into writing something to help analyse changes - fingers crossed the Squid conf file hasn't changed much.