Red Hat Training

A Red Hat training course is available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Chapter 5. Managing Kickstart and Configuration Files Using authconfig

The --update option updates all of the configuration files with the configuration changes. There are a couple of alternative options with slightly different behavior:
  • --kickstart writes the updated configuration to a kickstart file.
  • --test displays the full configuration with changes, but does not edit any configuration files.
Additionally, authconfig can be used to back up and restore previous configurations. All archives are saved to a unique subdirectory in the /var/lib/authconfig/ directory. For example, the --savebackup option gives the backup directory as 2011-07-01:
[root@server ~]# authconfig --savebackup=2011-07-01
This backs up all of the authentication configuration files beneath the /var/lib/authconfig/backup-2011-07-01 directory.
Any of the saved backups can be used to restore the configuration using the --restorebackup option, giving the name of the manually saved configuration:
[root@server ~]# authconfig --restorebackup=2011-07-01
Additionally, authconfig automatically makes a backup of the configuration before it applies any changes (with the --update option). The configuration can be restored from the most recent automatic backup, without having to specify the exact backup, using the --restorelastbackup option.