On 22/04/13 20:53, Ralph Mitchell wrote:

You might want to talk to your security people before copying the passed file to another system, and you *definitely* should not copy the shadow file. There are good reasons that file is readable only by root.

Ralph Mitchell

If you want to monitor changes to the passwd/shadow file, one way would be to write an ext script. One can get around the OS recording changes to users by just editing the files directly, so this would be a bit more foolproof. You'd need be to keep a copy of the passwd file somewhere else (say the xymon server itself) and then do a diff against it. Something like:

I've been watching this thread, but maybe I missed it...

Doesn't xymon allow to calculate the MD5 of a file and alert if it is modified..... I'm pretty sure this is a standard feature. Here it is:

- "MD5=md5sum", "SHA1=sha1sum", "RMD160=rmd160sum" trigger

a warning

if the file checksum using the MD5, SHA1 or RMD160

message digest

algorithms do not match the one configured here. Note:

The "file"

entry in the client-local.cfg file must specify which

algorithm to use.

Surely this would generate an appropriate alert if the file is modified... and continue to alert until the xymon config was updated with the new checksum.

Regards, Adam

-- Adam Goryachev Website Managers www.websitemanagers.com.au