Re: peculiar disappearance of most audit rules

[Eric Paris <eparis@redhat.com>]

On Mon, 2014-04-21 at 11:35 -0700, lists_todd@mac.com wrote:
> 
> On Apr 21, 2014, at 11:28 AM, Steve Grubb <sgrubb@redhat.com> wrote:
> 
> > What happens is that the text path that you put in a watch is a
> > human 
> > convenience. The kernel doesn't understand strings, it understands
> > numbers. It 
> > changes the path into device and inode information.
> 
> 
> Cool. So I am guessing the rule works even if someone creates a hard
> link to the same watched path and access files through that other
> path?

As I remember, and it's been a long time, watches should survive even if
the object being watched is deleted and recreated.  I seemed to remember
it was only if the parent directory is deleted that rules get evicted.

So that doesn't explain it for /boot!  Pretty darn hard to delete /!
But it could easily make sense for your other areas being watched...

But yes, if you watch /etc/shadow and someone accesses that inode
through another hard link, you will get audit records...