[ale] md5sum weirdness on firefox

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Wed, 2007-03-07 at 00:26 -0800, Joe Bayes wrote:

> It's supposed to give output even on success, right? Not that rpm has
> been exactly bulletproof lately. The standard fix (removing the
> __db files and --rebuilddb) didn't fix the problem. Neither did
> reinstalling rpm.


You know, once upon a time I heard someone liken RPM to something that
would have come from Redmond.

And, I said "Nah, they'll fix it in a few years or less, and that's not
what Redmond would do."  And I seem to have been proven wrong on that.
Red Hat is a good company, but I think it is time that they retire RPM
and switch over to APT.  Not only would they instantly get rid of the
problems of RPM which don't seem to have been improved in almost ten
years, but they would have something that they could improve, starting
from something that is known to be working.  :-)


> Then, I find out that my md5sum binary is horfed:
> 
>    spoo:~$ md5sum /usr/bin/md5sum
>    660081e855c8e3b562864c27946b9e69  /usr/bin/md5sum
>    spoo:~$ rpm -q coreutils
>    coreutils-5.97-12.3.fc6
>    spoo:~$ 
> 
> But I reinstalled coreutils, and now I am getting the same checksum as
> you are on /usr/bin/md5sum. Yay...one problem down. But I'm still
> getting the same bad firefox checksum:
> 
>    spoo:~/ff$ /usr/bin/md5sum /usr/bin/md5sum 
>    d4cbe115e872499ddd8dfebfe5bf37cb  /usr/bin/md5sum
>    spoo:~/ff$ /usr/bin/md5sum firefox-1.5.0.9-3.fc6.i386.rpm 
>    c1a703baffce31371ce91d2b830220d7  firefox-1.5.0.9-3.fc6.i386.rpm
> 
> I'm starting to wonder if maybe somebody rooted me. Either that, or
> SELinux is breaking things in some horribly silent and opaque way YET
> AGAIN. 


You might want to have a nightly cron job run that builds a database of
all the files, and then checks their MD5 hash against a known good one,
chucking out an e-mail for ones that are changed and not ELF objects, or
scripts outside of /home/*.  That way, you'll know the instant that a
file changes, and you'll also know (in theory) what changes are okay,
and what ones are not.  In that regard, you can create a "whitelist" of
files that you don't need to monitor (databases, etc.) and that way
anything something is changed that is not on that whitelist, you will
know about.

    -- Mike

--
Michael B. Trausch
                    fd0man at gmail.com
Phone: (404) 592-5746
                          Jabber IM:
                    fd0man at gmail.com
              fd0man at livejournal.com
Demand Freedom!  Use open and free protocols, standards, and software!
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: smime.p7s
Type: application/x-pkcs7-signature
Size: 3149 bytes
Desc: not available