See topic :P

We're trying to figure out why 3 rather important files are missing on a box.

Restoring the files is not an issue, we're just trying to nail down what caused them to be deleted in first place.

You should protect your 'rather important files' by giving almost no one rights to delete those files.
If only root can delete them, you know who did it, because only 1 (or 2) people know your root password....

Luckily you have a backup of you files...

Try to view the /var/log directory. Usually the system records all of the things you do on your system. You can view with "cat dmesg" and try to do a grep on the file that you are looking for.

e.g. cat /var/log/messages | grep -i filename
cat /var/log/dmesg | grep -i filename

I'll try that, thanks.

We installed the Oracle 10g Binaries and the 10g Grid Control Agent on one of our servers (with several productive 9.2.0 DBs) - and now it's missing it's listener.ora/tnsnames.ora files from /ora/app/oracle/network/admin. We're trying to figure out which of the two installations caused that - if either was the reason.

Generally no. At least directly.

The modification time for the directory is updated if a file is deleted from it, so if no other file deletion, rename or creation events have taken place since these important files were deleted, you might be able to work it out like that. It's a lot of 'if's though.

Another approach would be to check your incremental backups (you do have incremental backups, right)? Checking your daily backups will at least put an upper and lower bound on the date and time of removal.

If you're trying to work out how they got deleted, make sure you save the bash history file from all users who have rwx permissions on the parent directory. You can check through the commands executed to see if you can work out what happened.

If these files are used by some application (which now malfunctions), perhaps you can find clues about the time from the fallout of the failure. Without more information it is impossible for me to say.

Thanks to that advice and some putty logfiles (we already had replaced the missing files again) we were able to solve the mystery :P

Thanks !

A quick tip Which might help prevent Future file deletion .Set the Files attribute
using chattr +i (Imutable) attribute so that files doesnt get deleted
unless until root changes the attribute intentionally and then deletes it.