Occasionally you just want a bit of piece of mind about your server or Linux install. You may suspect there is somebody who has hacked your computer or even something changed by a package install that shouldn’t have been.

Heres a couple of ideas on how to do a quick ‘health’ check on he md5sum of binary packages. This gem is inspired by Ivan (who does mostly Dev stuff)

Debian based people should install dlocate and use that

apt-get install dlocate
dlocate -md5check openssh-server

To force a fail try something like this

mv /usr/share/man/man5/sshd_config.5.gz /usr/share/man/man5/sshd_config.5.gz-old
echo Boo > /usr/share/man/man5/sshd_config.5.gz
dlocate -md5check openssh-server

For Redhat/Centos etc based servers you can use yum

 rpm -qvV openssh

Again you can force a fail by changing a file

mv /usr/share/doc/openssh-4.3p2/CREDITS /usr/share/doc/openssh-4.3p2/CREDITS-old
echo Boo >/usr/share/doc/openssh-4.3p2/CREDITS
rpm -qvV openssh

For less verbosity just drop the lower case v (so its rpm -qV )