Introduction

System Configuration Collector (SCC) collects configuration data of systems in snapshots. The structure of the snapshot allows SCC to compare a snapshot with the previous one and to detect changes in the configuration. Upon detecting changes, SCC adds the differences to a logbook. The snapshot and the logbook are converted to HTML for local inspection. Optionally, the SCC-files can be send to a system running the SCC server software. On the server, summaries of the SCC-data are generated and search/compare operations on the snapshots and logbooks are available via a web-interface.

The logbook is a starting point in case a system "suddenly" does not work correctly and the administrator is wondering what he/she has changed in the last weeks or months. As most of us know by experience, configuration changes can have accidental side-effects on (other) systems. By examining the entries in the logbooks and considering the consequences, the cause of an actual problem might be found more easily than by just trying to remember the changes that were performed.

The snapshots can be used to compare the configuration of two systems. Imagine systems, that are supposed to be identical, but behave differently. Comparing parts of the snapshots of the two systems can indicate the cause of the difference in behaviour. All collected snapshots of a site can be analyzed when conducting a due diligence investigation.

The client and server software of SCC is available in many native system install-formats from the download page. The client part of SCC is also available for Windows systems. SCC (client and server) is free software under the terms of the GNU General Public License. Copyright (©) 2001 - 2004 Open Challenge B.V. Copyright (©) 2004 - 2005 OpenEyeT Professional Services B.V. Copyright (©) 2005 - 2018 QNH. Copyright (©) 2019 Siem Korteweg.

Refer to LinuxSecurity.com for a feature story covering SCC. We provide several snapshots and logbooks and captured some HTML-output to be used as an example here. Leif Sjölund kindly provides an online scc-srv.