Announce: cvs-tripwire 0.2

[Tobias Brox]

<URL:mailto:address@hidden>

Still quite immature, but it's better documented, (probably) less bugs, and
it has more features, and even a test script.  It's not at the web yet, but
you can get it by sending me an email.  Here's the head of the README:

WHAT IS IT?

cvs-tripwire is a small script that (through the use of md5sum) saves
fingerprints of all files in the CVS repository to a log file.  Later this
log file can be checked, to see that the repository never gets corrupted.


WHAT'S THE USE OF THAT?

You do take backups of your cvs repository, right?  It's the only sane thing
to do.  Data losses or data corruption does happen from time to time.  There
are a lot of things that can be done to _reduce_ the risk, but you can never
protect yourself completely against data losses - and once it happens, you
can only be certain to get your data back if you have a good backup scheme.

You should generally avoid throwing or deleting old backups, because the
backup itself might become corrupted, and the system might already be
corrupted when the backup is taken - sometimes a system might even be
corrupted for a long time without anyone noticing.  With my script, it
should be possible to check that neither the system nor the backup is
corrupted, thus you might be quite safe keeping only two backups, and you
don't have to spend a lot of time figuring out how far back in time you have
to go to find an uncorrupted backup.

The data might be corrupted in the first place because of hardware faults,
accidents or through malicious users, malicious programs (including viruses)
or even bugs.  You can never be safe.  I could write several pages with
real-life examples I've seen, experienced or heard about.

-- 
Unemployed hacker
Will program for food!
http://ccs.custompublish.com/