Last week we brought you the first of ten commandment's in the NewsForge's system administration guide. Today, we bring you the second.
Trust is a hard thing to come by in any workplace. Luckily for you, trust in your servers isn't. With the help of file integrity checkers, you can be absolutely sure of every change made within the filesystems of your servers.
II. Thou shalt establish absolute trust in thy servers
As their name suggests, file integrity checkers monitor the state of your filesystem, and report any changes that are made to files or directories back to you. They can monitor user and group ownership, last modification date, inode, file size, and a host of others items. This makes integrity checkers ideal for security applications, which is what most are designed for. If an intruder were to compromise one of your machines and modify a log file to hide his tracks, regular checks of your filesystem would immediately clue you in to a security breach. This type of early detection can make the difference between a quickly defeated intrusion and a serious sustained root-level compromise.
