Cfg2html
Version: GIT Web: www.bit.ly/2BF8VC2
When something goes wrong, Linux users turn to forums, message boards, social networks, IRC channels and other services in a desperate hope to get helpful feedback. A typical discussion under the ‘help me’ call begins with a request for details about what happened, as well as to show the most detailed information about the system.
Playing a crucial role in this is Config to HTML, or Cfg2html. As the Cfg2html developers say, it is a ‘Swiss Army knife’ for sysadmins. It was written to get necessary information to plan an update, to help you perform basic troubleshooting or undetake performance analysis.
Naturally, Cfg2html is not a desktop application and obviously has no GUI. Its primary purpose is to help diagnose production servers and extract as much system information as possible. Examining the program’s source tree revealed that Cfg2html is written mostly in pure Bash and has templates for HP UX, IBM AIX, BSD and Linux. The package provides a very helpful Makefile, which tries to package Cfg2html for your system. For Linux it only supports DEB and RPM (sorry, Arch users), and we soon got working packages on for our test distros. Once installed, Cfg2html needs root permissions to run, so let’s provide it, and tell the program to write its output files to a given directory: $ sudo cfg2html –o ~/test/dir After a minute or two, you can find the HTML file in the directory you specified. In our case, the results were breathtaking – it looked like Cfg2html collected the most comprehensive set imaginable of our system’s details.
The HTML document in our case weighed as much as 2.5 MB: it contained a solid Contents listing in the beginning, with links to dozens of sections below. It just couldn’t be more detailed, so you can spend your evening reading about top load processes, system-analyze reports, the list of installed packages or any other chapter that piques your interest.
“You can spend your evening reading about top load processes”