I spent part of Monday poking through a Fedora Core system that hadbeen partially compromised, and I was reminded yet again how one of myfavorite RPM features isn't as widely known as it could be. Namely, thatRPM keeps a handy database of the MD5 checksums about every file it'sinstalled (as well as a pile of other information). The rpm command's -V option taps this database to verify the actual files on the systemagainst what the database says they should be and

Every so often I read a genuinely electrifying article, one that makesme sit bolt upright in an 'ah-ha!' moment as it crystallizes things I'vebeen stumbling towards.

Peter Drucker's The Five Deadly Business Sins is one such article. Go read it now; I'll wait. (It nailed me to thefloor so much that I have a copy saved in case the Wall Street Journalever removes it or moves it behind their pay-wall.)

Looking back over my entries

In the spirit of equal opportunity annoyance :

One of the things that never fails to irritate me with Red Hat is thatwhen you do ' /bin/su root ' on astock system, you get a shell whose $PATH doesn't include /sbin or /usr/sbin .

This trips me up all the time, and every time it's an nngh moment. Andit's not as if Red Hat doesn't already have a ~root/.bashrc that doesquite a lot