suggestion for maintaining config of a system: maintain a list all manually-edited files (/opt/admin/config/FILES), use this script with suggested cron jobs to keep a hierarchy of config files in this central place which is also easy to back up

link-config-files.sh

#!/bin/sh
#
# suggested daily cron jobs: 
# 7 2 * * * /opt/admin/scripts/link-config-files.sh
# 8 3 * * * /opt/admin/scripts/backup-dir.sh /opt/admin
#
# example FILES format:
# /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
# /etc/fail2ban/jails.conf

BASE_CONFIG=/opt/admin/config
FILE_LIST=${BASE_CONFIG}/FILES
for DIR in etc; do
        rm -r $BASE_CONFIG/$DIR
done
cat ${FILE_LIST} | sed 's/#.*$//' | sed '/^\s*$/d' | while read FILE; do
        mkdir -p ${BASE_CONFIG}`dirname ${FILE}`
        ln -s ${FILE} ${BASE_CONFIG}${FILE}
done

for backup-dir.sh, see https://gist.github.com/kwikwag/6320820