Enabling Baseline Comparison

Introduction

Baseline comparison allows the information of an active system to be compared to a frozen baseline. The comparisons can contain up to four distinct baselines against the current system. Patches, hardward (boards, memory and disk count and type), Network and Kernel Parameter (/etc/system) baselines are manually assigned by the user.

Establishing a Baseline

Baselines are manually assigned through the "Administrative" rollover from any of the q-Status™ GUI's.

Note: When q-Status™ is installed, the baseline CGI programs (Create Baseline, Delete Baseline) in the Administrative CGI directory are disabled (they are not executable). These CGI programs are used to create and remove baseline files. To make them executable simply go to the Administrative CGI directory and use chmod as described below: #pwd /var/apache/htdocs/q-Status/Administrative/CGI #chmod 777 *.cgi It is recommeded that if you enable Baseline, you protect the "AdministrativeMenus" directory under q-Status™ with a password. To do this see "Authentication" for the Apache web server.

Selecting this rollover brings the user to the Administration page as shown below:

Two hyper links:

• Create Baselines
• Delete Baselines

"Create Baseline" will display a list of systems from q-Status™. From this list the user can assign a current system or multiple systems configuration as a base line at the current date. This option will create a "data_baseline" directory, if not already existing, and will copy existing configuration files to this directory. This directory is created in the same location as the "data" directory. Creation of the "data_baseline" will allow the display of the "Baseline Comparison" option on any of the table of contents of the q-Status™ GUI's.

The "Baseline Comparison" function will not be available in q-Status™ unless the "data_baseline" directory has been created. If this directory is deleted, the baseline comparison function will not be displayed in the GUI's table of contents.

"Delete Baseline" will display a list of host baselines by date. From this list the user can delete baseline configurations from the system.