Dconf is a tool to collect a system's hardware and software configuration. It allows to take your system configuration with you or compare systems (like nodes in a cluster) to troubleshoot HW or SW problems.

Dconf is also useful in projects where you have to manage changes as a team. Dconf can send out changes to your systems to a list of email addresses so that they can be revised.

As a sysadmin, you won't become too paranoid if less experienced people have root-access. As a consultant, you won't feel isolated if you don't have remote access to your systems. As a support engineer, you won't become frustrated if a customer has fiddled around with some important config file and you have to find what. If you run dconf, it will create a single-file snapshot of your system (config-files, hardware config, system state). By default it will store this file in /var/log/dconf and timestamp it, only when the content is different from the previous run.

You can configure dconf to run from cron on an hourly, daily, weekly or monthly basis and, in case of changes, have it send out a mail. Dconf allows you to go back in time, compare older snapshots, rollback changes or even compare systems with basic text-oriented tools.

Stores both hardware and software configuration in a single file
Only considers files that are not the default (compares with rpmdb if possible)
Allows to compare different systems in real-time
Allows to take configuration of systems with you to customers
Makes it easier to manage systems as a group
Can send out mails when changes have happened
Allows to roll back changes or associate problems with changes

If you find this tool useful, I need your help in improving the Dconf config files for different distributions. At this point only the Red Hat and Debian config files are maintained (but far from complete). I'm looking for people to add new sections (preferably in an automated fashion like the included scripts) and provide/maintain Dconf config files for other distributions.

Please check the for issues, feature requests and ideas. You can download packages of Dconf for:

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You can have access to the latest release via subversion from:

or you can download it as a tarball from:

I have made some sample configuration files available. You can find these in subversion (but also in the package documentation directory).

The current asciidoc manual page is found here:

Subversion also holds the current documentation and example config-files, so please look there for more information. If you have improvements, found a bug or have a great idea, please mail me so we can look at how to integrate it.