Comparison with existing systems:

Stamp is similar to tripwire and S3.

Stamp is distinguished in that it:

• Uses md5 only for checksums
• Handles file content, owner, group, extended permissions and symlink targets
• Is freely redistributable
• Is written in python
• Is intended for use on all files within a machine's "system partitions"
• Is typically run on a system right after installation
• Detects files that have been removed, but not files that have been added

Components of stamp, and what they do:

• stamp: Memorizes what a machine's "system" filesystems look like.
• check-stamp: Generates a new stamp, and compares it with /var/adm/stamp.gz
• S99stamp: Invoked from /etc/rc3.d (or similar), this creates a stamp (/var/adm/stamp.gz) the first time a machine is rebooted (and again until the first time a stamp is successfully generated).

Why?

Obviously, stamp can be used for security purposes - tho in that case, you probably don't want to leave the information lying around in /var/adm/stamp.gz.

We use stamp primarily to facilitate upgrades. That is, our autoinstall system automatically configures machines to run stamp right after an install, and then prior to an upgrade, we run check-stamp to see what things have been changed on the system, since the time when it was last installed. In practice, this takes a lot of guess-work out of reinstalling machines that are normally administrated by other individuals.

Installation:

• Make sure you have gzip and gunzip somewhere.
• Grab stamp.shar.
• Grab daemon, compile it and install it. It's an easy build. This was needed for proper operation of S99stamp on OSF/1, but you can probably get away without on most unix variants).
• Grab the python distribution and build it, if you haven't already. This language is so much more reasonable than perl... Python is also an easy (autoconf'd) build.
• Extract the files in stamp.shar, and copy stamp and check-stamp to reasonable places (/usr/local/bin for most sites)
• grep for "dcs" and change any pathnames containing this string, to those that are appropriate for your environment.
• Copy S99stamp into /etc/rc3.d (or /sbin/rc3.d on OSF/1), and reboot