[CentOS] Changed md5sums on a bare-bones install. Logical explanation?

Wed Jun 14 17:40:32 UTC 2006
John Ziniti <rejpz at channing.harvard.edu>

William Hooper wrote:
> John Ziniti wrote:
>> I'm looking at some strange behavior on a _very_ barebones
>> installation.  I'd like to get some feedback on possible logical
>> explanations.
>>
>> * What I'm seeing:  The md5sum of all of my binaries in
>> /usr/bin and /usr/sbin are changing exactly one hour
>> after installation of CentOS-4.3.
> 
> man prelink

Aha!  Well, the good news is that you are, of course, right and
there is a logical explanation for this after all (Whew!).

The only bad news I guess, is that I've wasted so much time
looking for a mysterious problem that isn't there :-/

Just for posterity, the following was what I used to verify
that the changes were from prelinking:

# prelink --undo /usr/sbin/lsof
# md5sum /usr/sbin/lsof

The md5sum from that last command gave me the result I
desired.   Re-running prelink on /usr/sbin/lsof gives me
the "foreign" md5sum again.  I guess I'll just have to prelink from
now on before I initialize tripwire.

Thanks a ton, William.  If you're ever in Boston, I owe
you a [ affordable beverage of your choice ].

- JZ