Is Tripwire Still Relevent?

Deagol asks "I work for a good-sized University. I've heard that Tripwire and our software licensing department is negotiating for a site-license. I was asked to comment on whether our department would like to buy in. I personally lost interest in Tripwire when they went commercial (I guess seeing a well-respected research tool go proprietary soured the milk for me), and though I've toyed briefly with the 'open source' version, I mainly have experience with the Academic Source Release. Seeing how their demo is only a 'simulation' (how lame is that?), I can't get a feel for what the commercial version can really do for me. Does anyone know the value (if any) of commercial Tripwire over the free one; Are there open source packages that have made Tripwire obsolete?"

Comments

FCheck

[sydb]

About 4 months ago, a Windows-knowledgable colleague and my Unix-using self did a comparison of TripWire, ViperDB, Aide, Fcheck and another tool whose name escapes me. We were looking for speed, simplicity, effectiveness and portability *nix/Win32).

FCheck ruled the day. It's easy to configure, works on *nix and Win32 (it's written in Perl), very fast in operation (We found Tripwire to be unusably slow/CPU-intensive for regularly scheduled checks) and passed every functional test we threw at it. It logs to syslog so you can send output to a remote machine. And it's GPL'd.

As for Tripwire's proprietary version, my colleague reckoned the only benefit was the GUI. Personally I don't see the point of a GUI on a security tool which is meant to run unsupervised. I suppose it does reporting etc. but really, what more do you need other than "This file changed at dd/mm/yy, hh:mm.ss. The change was ....". A little bit of scripting will do everything else for you.