Drift

This is a tool for differentiating two running linux instances. It collects all installed packages, files, file acls, users, groups, etc. to compile an html report on each type of diff.

Optimally, one would have their infrastructure stored as code and easily deployable so the types of problems which this app is aimed at don't even occur. But in bare metal deployments, it's easy to take a shortcut and just change a configuration or install a package directly on the machine instead of following the procedures and documenting everything done.

Getting started

The app consists of a single binary that runs as either the server or the client. The idea is that you run servers on two separate linux instances you wish to compare, and the client is ran on your machine from which you are collecting and reviewing the results.

A Vagrant definition for 3 VMs is also included to streamline the testing process.

The process:

• To compile the code, simply run go build, and the drift binary will appear after a short while.
• Then you can start the Vagrant machines with vagrant up
• Start servers on target1 and target2 machines:

vagrant ssh target1 # do the same on target2
cd /vagrant
sudo ./drift -d -pass testpass

• start the diffing proces on the client machine:

vagrant ssh client
cd /vagrant
./drift -config test-conf.json

This will create several html files on the client (and in the directory on host where the procedure is run, if the /vagrant dir on VMs is synchronized):

• acls-report.html - shows differences in acls
• files-report.html - shows differences in files
• packages-report.html - shows differences in installed packages
• users-report.html - shows differences in users on the systems.

These html files can be large and they depend on bootstrap to show the ui in a more dynamic fashion. The files can be quite large so be prepared to let the browser render slowly. Better report templates for this are on my TODO list.