Cool post!!! I've been thinking of installing Tripwire, and probably will eventually, but this is an excellent approach until I get around to it...

I'm going to try to write a script to run in a daily cron with this, and send the results back to me in an e-mail... Using something like: "md5sum -c filelist.md5 | grep FAILED" and then pop the results in a mail message...

I'd like to implement some kind of incrementation variable into it, so my mail would say something like: "0 files changed" or "7 files changed", and then provide the details of the altered files... But I'll have to think about that because I'm not very good with shell scripts... Any hints???

Kind of a simple approach, but you might at least get 1 email before an intruder catches on and mucks up your checksums... (Maybe hide the md5 file or give it an obscure name??? But then I guess its location will be in your script...)