On 17 Oct 2008, at 09:41, Sean Carolan wrote: > We have several dozen production Linux servers and I would like to > have better control over what files are changed, by whom, when they > were changed, etc. Because these are all production servers that are > in use 24x7, we do not have the luxury of simply doing a clean build, > taking md5sums of each file, and then doing fresh installations. I > need a system that can take in-place snapshots of each server's > configuration files, store them in some kind of database or text file, > and notify me whenever something changes. > > I've used tripwire in the past - do you have any other recommendations > for this type of project? you might want to look at dconf, from http://dag.wieers.com/home-made/dconf/ . probably not hard to script something to notify you when a new snapshot is taken. ===== If you run dconf, it will create a single-file snapshot of your system (config-files, hardware config, system state). By default it will store this file in /var/log/dconf and timestamp it, only when the content is different from the previous run. You can configure dconf to run from cron on an hourly, daily, weekly or monthly basis and, in case of changes, have it send out a mail. Dconf allows you to go back in time, compare older snapshots, rollback changes or even compare systems with basic text-oriented tools. ===== Jeremiah