              ViperDB - Filesystem Integrity Monitor
              --------------------------------------
                          Version 0.9.3
                
ViperDB was created as a smaller & faster option to Tripwire. Tripwire,
while being a great product leaves something to be desired in the speed
department and also, by default tripwire generates a report everytime
it runs and directs that report to an email address. This hinders most 
people from running Tripwire every few minutes to do a system check. 
ViperDB however is the answer to this problem. ViperDB does not use a 
fancy all-in-one database to keep records instead, I opted to keep it 
fast and hence decided to go with a plaintext db which is stored in 
each "watched" directory. By using this there is no real one attack 
point for a attacker to focus his attention on. This coupled with the 
running of ViperDB every 5 minutes (via cron root job) decreases that 
likelyhood that an attacker will be able to modify your "watched" 
filesystem while ViperDB is monitoring your system 

Project website  : http://www.resentment.org/projects/viperdb/
Project mirror   : http://panorama.sth.ac.at/viperdb/
Project contacts : J-Dog <J-Dog@Resentment.org>
                   Peter Surda <shurdeek@panorama.sth.ac.at>

Installation
------------
 1.) download latest version of ViperDB
 2.) uncompress archive
 3.) enter distro directory
 4.) edit viperdb.conf to include and directories you wish to monitor
 5.) copy viperdb.conf to /usr/local/etc/
 6.) edit viperdb.ignore to include all files you want to ignore
 7.) copy viperdb.ignore to /usr/local/etc/
 8.) edit viperdb.pl to change $notify_email and $loglevel
 9.) copy viperdb.pl to /usr/local/sbin/
 10.) run viperdb.pl -init
 11.) add viperdb.pl to your crontab
      */5 * * * * /usr/local/sbin/viperdb.pl -check
      OR
 11.) copy filecheck.sh to /etc/cron.hourly

Release Notes
-------------
If you want the new MD5 checking feature, add -md5 to commandline as 
the second argument. WARNING: Be advised this may take some time and
increase the load on the computer somewhat. (18x in benchmark tests)

If you have old viperdb db files (without MD5) and want to upgrade 
them, it is done automatically if you use -check -md5 or -init -md5.
Both data file formats stay supported however, without the -md5 switch
viperdb should behave exactly as before.


Questions/Comments/Problems
---------------------------
If you have any questions, comments, suggestions, or are having problems
getting ViperDB to work on your system, please feel free to email the 
the ViperDB developer(s) at : viperdb-devel@resentment.org