SCPM

[Erik Bågfors]

Hi!

First of all I'll like to apologize for this long mail but this
feature was just to good not to have in whatever distro I'm running.

As I wrote in another mail one of the most impressive things about
SuSE linux in my opinion is SCPM - System Configuration Profile
Management.

SCPM allows you to store different profiles of your system
configuration and to switch between them.  This is done in a much
better way than anything I've seen.  It doesn't just do it for network
settings but for pretty much anything you want.  I can have one set of
settings for home and one for work that includes the firewall, autofs,
network, ftp-server, ntp-client setups and so on.  And it's still done
in a very simple and unintrusive way.

I'd love to see this in ubuntu and when I showed it to a friend he
started talking about porting it to debian.  Now I feel like I should
join him do that to get it into ubuntu.

Here is how it works.
You can define a number of "Resources" a resource can be either a file
or a service. So the file /etc/hosts can be a resource and the service
"nfs" can be a resource. You then group these resources into "resource
groups". So on SuSE the "network" resource group includes the
following resources:
service network
file /etc/hosts
file /etc/resolv.conf
file /etc/sysconfig/network
etc...

Then one can select which groups that should be activated. On my
laptop I have the following active. autofs, network, ntpd, printer,
and xf86.

All resources and groups are setup by SuSE so you normally don't have
to mess with them (apart from turning some on if you like to use them)

Well, that's the setup.  Now to use scpm you add a "profile".  Each
profile has a name and a description, but that's about it (well, you
can have a bunch of scripts with it but usually that's nothing that
you have to care about).

So say you add a work profile and a home profile.

You edit you configuration settings in whichever way you want, use
gst, edit config files, use YaST... whatever.  When you switch to
another profile the files and state of the current configuration for
the active resource groups are save in scpm and the configuration of
the other profile is restored from scpm and put in their final
possition.  All services that have been changed are restarted and you
have a nice new system to use.

Apart from this you can also add PROFILE=Home to a entry in grub and
whenever you boot it stores the profile you had active before shutdown
and restores the Home profile before the system starts up.

Everything is controllable from a commandline but it's also possible
to run it from within a Yast GUI.  I don't think the GUI has anything
to do in ubuntu but it should be to hard to write a new one since all
it should to is call the commandline tools.

So, would something like this be interesting to have in ubuntu? It's a
real killer for laptops

Regards,
Erik