Sysf is a system administration tool designed to greatly simplify the central configuration of a network of Linux/Unix computers and make Linux/Unix even more scalable. All the system configuration files of the individual computers are archived in a common set of directories and sysf maintains this archive and the real system files.

The strength of sysf is to simplify the maintenance of the system files across a network and in particular:

• to make the system administration of a large network scalable.
• to offer a global view of all the configuration files across the network.
• to guarantee that some system files are identical across all hosts belonging to the same group. This is particularly important for files like inetd.conf or hosts.allow that implement some security policy.
• to configure identical hosts.
• to implement configuration changes on many computers simultaneously.
• to simplify the configuration of new hosts when they are added to the network.
• to maintain a backup copy of the entire configuration of the network.

Version 2 of sysf has various extra features including

• Maintaining the ownership and the access mode of the system files.
• Maintaining entire directories.
• Maintaining symbolic links.
• Enforcing that a file does not exist.
• Can use ssh as well as rsh.
• Better ways to select groups of hosts and config files.

What SYSF does

SYSF User Guide

If you have problems or suggestions feel free to contact me b.m.a.g.piette@durham.ac.uk.

If you upgrade sysf, make a backup copy of your config directory /usr/local/sys/config before upgrading from the new rpm file!

Sysf is available as Redhat packages or as a tared compressed source file. The differences with sysf2.04 are as follow:

• BUG Fix : when reading the hosts.conf file, sysf was aborting without any error message when an undefined host group was being used. This bug has been fixed.
• Extra feature : The "belongs_to" command has been added to sysf:

          # sysf -belongs_to HOST_GROUP -h HOST
  

  This sysf command checks that the host HOST belongs to the host group HOST_GROUP. This is useful when wrinting certain admin shell scrypt.
• The HTML fnd ps doc files have been updated to describe the extra feature.

Our firewall configuration (over which I have no control), does not allow passive ftp connection. This means that downloading files using anonymous ftp from a web browser does not work from outside our campus.

To download the file bellow (assuming you use Netscape) right click on one of the links below, and select "save link as" to download the file.

sysf-2.05-2.i386.rpm

sysf-2.05-2.src.rpm

sysf-2.05.tar.gz

You can also download the following files using anonymous ftp on fourier.dur.ac.uk in binary mode:

• pub/dma0bmp/sysf/sysf-2.05-2.i386.rpm
• pub/dma0bmp/sysf/sysf-2.05-2.src.rpm
• pub/dma0bmp/sysf/sysf-2.05.tar.gz

FTP DOWNLOAD (within the Durham campus only)

sysf-2.04-2.i386.rpm

sysf-2.04-2.src.rpm

sysf-2.04.tar.gz

Sysf is available as Redhat packages or as a tared compressed source file. This new version of sysf is stable. I have used it daily for a few months before deciding to release it.

To download the file bellow (assuming you use Netscape) right click on one of the links below, and select "save link as" to download the file.

sysf-2.04-2.i386.rpm

sysf-2.04-2.src.rpm

sysf-2.04.tar.gz

You can also download the following files using anonymous ftp on fourier.dur.ac.uk in binary mode:

• pub/dma0bmp/sysf/sysf-2.04-2.i386.rpm
• pub/dma0bmp/sysf/sysf-2.04-2.src.rpm
• pub/dma0bmp/sysf/sysf-2.04.tar.gz

FTP DOWNLOAD (within the Durham campus only)

sysf-2.04-2.i386.rpm

sysf-2.04-2.src.rpm

sysf-2.04.tar.gz

sysf v1 is still available for download but we recommend to update to version 2.

The old documentation is still available on line: SYSF v1 manual.

To download the file bellow (assuming you use Netscape) right click on one of the links below, and select "save link as" to download the file.

sysf-1.02-1.i386.rpm

sysf-1.02-1.src.rpm

sysf-1.02.tar.gz

You can also download the following files using anonymous ftp on fourier.dur.ac.uk in binary mode:

• pub/dma0bmp/sysf/sysf-1.02-1.i386.rpm
• pub/dma0bmp/sysf/sysf-1.02-1.src.rpm
• pub/dma0bmp/sysf/sysf-1.02.tar.gz

sysf-1.02-1.i386.rpm

sysf-1.02-1.src.rpm

sysf-1.02.tar.gz

This web page is maintained by Bernard Piette.