[CentOS] Good md5sum snapshot tool?

Thu Jun 4 22:28:06 UTC 2009
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 3, 2009 at 3:18 PM, Sean Carolan <scarolan at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I have a server that is undergoing some patching soon and would like
>> to make note of any files that have changed after the patching is
>> complete.  Can you recommend a tool that uses md5sum snapshots to do a
>> quick before and after test, showing anything that's changed on a
>> particular file system?
> 
> I use md5deep for that. http://md5deep.sourceforge.net/. aide is
> useful for particular files oyu are going to keep track of over a long
> time (doing daily checks etc).
> 
> md5deep/aide/etc will break if you have prelink turned on.. especially
> if you are doing updates. prelink sort of moves around library
> pointers in the binary which changes the checksums. rpm is smart
> enough to deal with this and aide is getting that smarts.. but not
> with the shipped version.

How much of a gain to you get from prelink anyway?  I suppose it also 
breaks the way backuppc does pooling of identical files where if you 
update a library all of the files linking to it would change and require 
new backup instances to be saved.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com