What is Coggs?
Coggs is designed as a tool for UNIX systems administrators to keep track of changes made to groups of UNIX systems. How often have you had questions like:
- What is the hardware configuration of host regulus?
- What changes have been made to configuration files on host orion in the last week?
- What the configuration look liked on host rigel as of October 11, 2003?
- Even though the machines orion and rigel have identical hardware configuration, what could be causing one to be much faster than the other?
- Can you show me visually changes made to orion's /etc/hosts file over the last month?
Coggs:
- Is written in perl
- Uses secure shell (ssh) over TCP/IP
- Uses the ssh key functionality for unattended operation
- Consists of a collector which goes out to all the monitored machines and gathers configuration information
- Has a database (currently running on PostgreSQL, but could easily be ported to MySQL) for storing the changes
- Uses apache to deliver reports on changes to any client with a web browser
Logical Layout

Click for larger image