Lone in the night

The context For a project, we had to create over 100 virtual machines (VM), each one with specific caracteristics: OS, # CPU, RAM, # disks, disk space... About 1/3 VM are Windows, 2/3 Linux. I maintain a MS Access Database with the requested VM. The project is near ending; for quality control, I need to validate what is delivered vs. what was requested. My sysadmins went on almost(*) all the VM to get the caracteristics; the result is 2 text files, one for Windows and one for Linux. *: This is important. I don't have all the VM yet, hence I will have to do this process again; this have to be taken into account in my solution. How to compare the data? Method 1: by hand Boring, tedious and highly error prone. Forgotten. Method 2: using Excel I tried that first. But I'm not a king on Excel, and because the caracteristics are quite different between Linux and Windows, is't hard to make comparisons. Abandoned. Method 3: using Access This is actuall...

How to embed INNER JOIN in MS Access SELECT ... FROM ( ( T1  INNER JOIN  T2 ON ... )        INNER JOIN  T3 ON ... )      INNER JOIN T4  ON ...;

I want to compare the installed packages between a couple of Linux servers. Obviously, using a database comes to mind. And my Office Pro includes a pretty good database: MS Access. The problem I have tables with a list of Linux packages installed on several servers, one table per server. I want a table with all the packages common to all servers, and for each package (ex: audit-libs-python-1.8-2.el5 ), the package root ( audit-libs-python ) and the version ( 1.8-2.el5 ). Step 1: selecting the common packages SELECT DISTINCT Srv1.Package FROM Srv1, Srv2, Srv3, Srv4 WHERE Srv1.Package = Srv2.Package and Srv2.Package = Srv3.Package and Srv3.Package = Srv4.Package; Step 2: extracting the package root and version Package versions are not always written in a similar way. Some examples: Package                Root        Version anacron-2.3-45....