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Accepted
Stuart Woodward
Asked: 2012-05-30 00:54:54 +0800 CST

I have two servers, how can I find the files that are different?

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I have two servers, a production server and a cloned image of the production server. There is some difference in the cloned image that is preventing it from working. I'd like to have a list of the differences.

The servers are on different networks so I can't easily compare them. What I need is a something which will create a database of the checksums on the production server and clone server and compare them.

Is there already something that can do this? Or is it easier to write a script to do this?

linux

4 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    At each server as root:

    find / -type f -exec md5sum {} \; >server-foo.com-files.txt

    Then copy those files to your workstation or whatever and

    diff -U0 server-foo.com-files.txt otherserver-foo.com-files.txt

    That will show you the differences between MD5 sums.

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  2. I'd go with rsync (which will also update the files if you tell it to):

     [root@local ~]# rsync -avn user@remote:/somedir /somedir
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  3. We have a tool that runs diff algorithms between multiple servers. It can also be scheduled to do daily or hourly diffs as a way to watch for unexpected changes. It's in free beta right now, http://metaforsoftware.com, hope it can help you. (Full disclosure: I'm a co-founder)

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  4. You can use diff to compare files (you will need to write a simple scipt that will check all files in some directories that you want to check and write output to log file).

    Also you can use md5sum to calculate md5s for every file and then find files that differs and use diff on them to find out the differences.

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