[Dirvish] Combining Dirvish, Rsync, and Osiris

[Keith Lofstrom]

I use Osiris host integrity monitoring ( osiris.shmoo.com ) to check
for hacked files on my systems.  It uses a cryptographically
secured client side program to do strong-encryption checksums on
client files and compare them to a server database through an SSL
link.  However, the configuration interface and scheduling is
lousy, as is the change reporting;  Osiris also does not
incorporate information about automated yum or apt updates, so
the change reports are unnecessarily verbose.  

On the bright side, Osiris can run checksums on all client machines
in parallel, and this is faster than Rsync file movement.  It is
not fooled by prelink, which changes files but resets the metadata
to hide the "innocent" changes.  Rsync is very good at moving
files and making hardlinked images, and can be driven from a list
of files rather than do its own scanning.

It would be great to have a version of dirvish that combined these
two, using the clean dirvish scheduler and front end for Osiris.
Osiris would feed change information to Rsync, which would build
new backup images using Osiris output as an input file rather than
by scanning the client file systems the current way.  The combination
would be faster and more complete. 

If dirvish also incorporated an interface to yum and apt, as well
as modules for "rdiff"-style backup of very large, slowly changing
files, and modules for other special large files like databases,
dirvish could become best-of-breed on many fronts.  

It may even be that Rsync could move files and data with SSL rather
than SSH  If so, this might avoid the Rsync/SSH failures our Windows
uses suffer from.  Maybe.  SSL setup and certs are difficult, but the
Osiris setup method for those is somewhat easier.

I have neither the time or skill to do these things, but if one or
two of you are ambitious enough to make these major changes, I would
be glad to host the project at the dirvish site and help you test
the early releases.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs