I am starting to use git to manage application server configurations — partially to ensure team members are familiarizing themselves with git and thinking about it when they update code (we’ve seen a LOT of tweaks that are not pushed to the git server), but also to reduce the administrative overhead of managing servers.

The best use case thus far has been our sendmail environment — seven servers with three configuration bases. By issuing certificates with SAN values for each host name and the VIP name, we are able to use the same cert and config file on each server in a functional group. Admins can make changes to the config offline (i.e. we’re not live-editing config files on the sendmail servers), there is history to who made the changes {and a quick means of reverting changes), and, using a cron’d pull, we can ensure changes are consistent across the environment.