What is the most important benefit an administrator can get out of SCC? How can this improve the overall security of a network or host?
Siem Korteweg: Each administrator should document his/her systems. We all know that, but we all lack time to do this properly. SCC automates the documentation process. For HP-UX systems SCC collects more than 95% of the configuration of the system is covered by SCC. For other system the percentage is somewhat lower at the moment. The logbooks and snapshots can assist administrators in finding the cause of an incident. Configuration changes can have unwanted side-effects (on other systems). By examining the logbooks for the changes during the last days/weeks an administrator might find the cause of an incident easier/faster. Another way of using the SCC-data to find the cause of an incident is to compare (parts of) the configuration of a system with a comparable system that does function correctly. Comparing the configuration of systems can also be used to assure that the systems in a cluster are consistent and identical. Do they run the same (versions of) software? Do they have the sam
