Hi

Is there any software or script that would monitor changes made to server configuration and new packages installed ?

Our IT team is growing and sometimes people make changes to servers without letting others know. They are supposed to email all changes to "changes" distribution list so that everyone is aware, but if they fail to do that nobody knows that something has been added or changed which makes it really hard to troubleshoot if something else fails because of that change.

Ideally I would like to receive an email every time someone changes or installs anything and be able to view changes on some kind of dashboard. Tried googling for it but did not find anything useful so far.

logwatch.

But it won't alert you every time a package is installed.

What OS(s)?

It's possible to "monitor" the package database file (if one exists and most OSs these days do have one in one fashion or another)

Hi

I'm using Linux Debian on majority of my servers ( a couple of OpenBSD boxes, but the problem relates to Debian boxes )
I have found a solution called Tripwire, which I am about to test. Might be worthwhile.

I would like to be notified whenever someone installs a package or modifies any config file and ideally know who's done it. I would be fine with the output of "last" command as this pretty much shows who's logged in at the time. I use sudo anyway and nobody can log in as root directly.

There was a data guy, we have fired recently, that was trying to prove how skilled he was and made a terrible mess trying to install some software on a database server. To tell you how skilled he was, enough to say he installed php-cgi wanting to install php-cli ( Debian package for php commandline ) and left it as that. The problem is not that he installed that, but he did not say anything ( probably because he's failed ). I do not log in to each server everyday, I monitor them with nagios, but it will not tell me if the configs have been changed.

Tripwire is a good choice, and I'm sorry I didn't think of that.

I have never used it but I'm confident it could monitor specific items such as you intend.

Others here may have more to say about that.