Utilizing Git for configuration management

One of the most valuable assets on a server is its configuration. This is second only to the actual data stored on the server. Often, when we implement a new technology on a server, we'll spend a great deal of time editing configuration files all over the server to make it work as best as we can. This can include any number of things from Apache virtual host files, DHCP server configuration, DNS zone files, and more. If a server were to encounter a disaster from which the only recourse is to completely rebuild it, the last thing we'll want to do is re-engineer all of this configuration from scratch. This is where Git comes in.

Git is a development tool, used by software engineers everywhere for the purpose of version control for source code. In a typical development environment, an application being developed by a team of engineers can be managed by Git, with each engineer contributing to a repository that hosts the source code for their...