CHECKSECURITY(8)

💖 CHECKSECURITY 💖

okay bestie, welcome to section 8 of the System Manager's Manual — yes, we're in the big-girl system administration pages now, and this one is literally called checksecurity. she's not fancy, she's not loud, she's just a lil bundle of system checks doing her thing. 🫶

✨ NAME ✨

checksecurity — run a collection of simple system checks 🎀

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

checksecurity

that's it. no flags. no args. she just goes. 💅

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so the checksecurity command runs a small collection of simple system checks — key word small, key word simple — and the whole point of them is to catch a few common security issues before they become a whole situation. 🙈

and like, she's on a schedule, bestie. checksecurity is run by cron on a daily basis. so every single day, no days off, she's out here doing her lil security vibe check on your machine. iconic behaviour honestly. 👑

🌈 CONFIGURATION 🌈

so the checksecurity.conf file is where all the decisions get made. she defines several configuration variables:

• MAILTO
• CHECK_DISKFREE
• CHECK_PASSWD
• CHECK_SETUID
• LOGDIR

each one is described down below, don't worry, we're getting there. 💜

also — and this is the part people always sleep on — the checksecurity program works with a whole collection of plugins. those plugins live in /usr/share/checksecurity, and each one is configured individually by its own configuration file. so she's not a monolith, she's a whole friend group. 🧚✨

CHECK_PASSWD — if this is set to TRUE then the check-passwd script will be invoked. and what does that script do? she's designed to report upon system accounts which have no passwords. no password. on a system account. absolutely not. 😭

CHECK_DISKFREE — if this is set to TRUE then the check-diskfree script will be invoked, and she will allow an alert to be sent if there is any mounted partition that is running short on disk space. she will let you know. she is a noticer. 🔥

CHECK_SETUID — if this is set to TRUE then the check-setuid script will be invoked. this one will compare the setuid binaries upon the system to those that existed previously and show the differences. it's giving spot-the-difference but make it security-critical. 💀

ngl bestie, the original page drops MAILTO and LOGDIR into the variable list without a paragraph of their own down here — so we're keeping it exactly that way. no cap, no invented lore. 🙈

🎀 FILES 🎀

• /etc/checksecurity.conf — the checksecurity configuration file. this is where the vibes get configured, periodt.

🔍 SEE-ALSO 🔍

see also check-diskfree(8), check-setuid(8), check-passwd(8) and check-iptables-logs(8) — the whole squad, go read them too, they're all part of the same little security check friend group. 🌸

and that's the page, bestie!! Debian Linux, 2 February 1997 — yeah she's been around since the 90s and she's still showing up to work every day. main character energy fr fr. go set your CHECK_ variables and stay safe out there. 💖✨🎀🦋💅