Archival Usage
Up until this point we have been concerned with the basic low-level operations of the fingerprint command. However, typical usage for long term archival is very simple.
Analysis
Given a directory of data that you would later like to verify for consistency, we first need to analyse the data to create a fingerprint. Depending on the amount of data this can take some time.
$ sudo <span class="function">fingerprint</span> -a /etc
-- If you are repeating analysis, you need to use -f
-- to force updating the existing fingerprint.
$ sudo <span class="function">fingerprint</span> -a -f /etc
Once this is done, you will notice the file exists in the directory that was analysed: ._index.fingerprint. This file contains the fingerprint data. You can control the name of this file using the -n $name option.
Verification
After analysis is complete, data can be verified at any time.
$ sudo <span class="function">fingerprint</span> -v /etc
S
error.count 0
<span class="stderr">Data verified, 0 errors found.</span>If files were modified or removed, you will receive some error messages:
$ sudo vim /etc/hosts
-- Made some changes ^_^'
$ sudo <span class="function">fingerprint</span> -v /etc
W ./hosts
changes.file.size.new 245
changes.file.size.old 236
changes.key.MD5.new e8db756a9ea5cba150a4056af7090d65
changes.key.MD5.old cbe7e7eb6480e869bccfa284dc8bd732
changes.key.SHA2.256.new c8a1c725a37564ae222fb5916cba645ed8074dcb5ee38a44dac5e2c1713f00c6
changes.key.SHA2.256.old e4fe83dc983472b9507fc9dbc30721b6dbdf5ec014ec10b36afb92cef0ab2094
error.code keys_different
error.message Key SHA2.256 does not match
S
error.count 1
<span class="stderr">Data inconsistent, 1 errors found!</span>