[Techtalk] msec what is it, and why is it in an hourly cron?

[Linda Mayhugh]

It's Mandrake's security program. It makes sure the default security 
settings are what it thinks they ought to be and will override any 
changes you've made manually. That's why you see it changing permissions 
levels and such. The main script the hourly cron calls is 
/usr/share/msec.py. 

When the system was first installed a security level was chosen, and the 
parameters for each of the levels are in that config file. You can 
easily tweak the msec.py file to do whatever you actually want it to do 
rather than what Mandrake set it for.

Linda M


On 5 Nov 2002, E. Sterling Wall wrote:

> So, I've started just looking for random things. Now, there is a link to
> msec sitting in the cron/hourly directory, and I was wondering if I
> could just kill that and see if it didn't hurt anything. I don't
> actually KNOW what msec does, though. There's no man entry for it... The
> logs show that it is changing file ownership and mods on several files,
> though. (changing ownership from root to adm usually) That seems a bit
> odd to me. Why in the world would it need to do that? Can anyone tell me
> what this thing does and if it's OK to delete it from cron?