Back to the geekiness

Okay, I got obsessed with the gallery thing for a bit. I’m looking forward to adding it to my sister’s wedding website as well. But back to the geekiness. It took me a while to perfect this command in Linux, but I thought I’d share it, just in case it served any use to anybody else (which it won’t).

set $(date); find [...your base directory] \( -type d -name "*cache" -prune \) -o -mtime 0 -type f -printf "%TD \t %Tr \t %h \t %f \r\n" > changes_$6-$2-$3.out

What it does is output a tab deliminated file with a report of all of the files that have been changed in the last 24 hours, named with the current date. You can then add it to a shell script and use a program like Mutt to mail it to you as an attachment. I have mine set up to open automatically in Excel, sort by date and time, truncate directory names and highlight index files. It’s how I check for hackers in the morning.

My other handy tool is Firefox’s “open in tabs”. I bookmark all of the sites that I need to check in one folder, then put it in my toolbar. Then I just open a new window, pull down the menu and click “open in tabs”. Presto, I can Command-Tab through all of my sites looking for anything out of the ordinary.

Of course, these are all after-the-fact security measures. I have scripts that check file permissions, run incremental and full backups, and backup every mySQL database nightly. But I’ve mentioned all of that before. I did check with my host, and all of my databases are firewalled, so my biggest security concern is really the open-source software I use. It doesn’t have any more security flaws than anybody else, it’s just that once they’re discovered, there’s a whole playground full of targets for script kiddies. Someday, when I find a programmer who I can really work with, and who I trust to program a CMS from the ground up, I’ll write my own small scale one for clients to use. Until then, open source provides the absolute best solution for all of us.

Wow, that turned into an open source rant… weird