How to Keep Track of Changes to the System

[ray <ray@aarden.us>]

I would like to find a way to keep track of changes I make to my system.  It seem that I may learn from others on how they keep track of changes they make to their systems.

When I make changes, I don't remember where I made changes or why.  

It would be great to have a log of what changes I've made, where they were made, how they were made (direct edit, scripted, etc.), why I made them, references that I used to determine the change, and what was the outcome.

Right now, I get lost in my documentation.  I research solutions, make notes in Onenote on a Windows machine, record configurations files that I will test.  But It is difficult to record results such as syslogs or console transactions.  More challenging is that I have different notebook tabs for different objectives.  So when I want to see what I changed, I have to go through many different objectives because I don't know what object I was shooting for when I made the change.

I would really like to hear how others track their changes or suggestions how I may tack changes.

I store all the changes on a different computer because I screw up the installation on my machine under test and rebuild the OS.  The laptop I am building to run Xen is on its 28th build.  

I would appreciate any suggestions.

Ray