Running auditd from inittab

Running auditd from inittab

[Matthew Booth]

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I was testing various failures of auditd, and amongst them I tested kill
-SEGV and kill -KILL. I noticed that neither of these generate any audit
event or log activity. It occurs to me that this could be worked around,
and at the same time you could provide some additional level of
reliability, if auditd could be run from inittab. Unfortunately, the
only option to auditd seems to be -f, and this prevents it from logging
in the normal manner.

Are there any other options which might achieve this? If not, is this a
reasonable feature request?

Thanks,

Matt
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Re: Running auditd from inittab

[Steve Grubb]

On Friday 02 February 2007 08:02, Matthew Booth wrote:
> I was testing various failures of auditd, and amongst them I tested kill
> -SEGV and kill -KILL. I noticed that neither of these generate any audit 
> event or log activity.

KILL is uncatchable and SEGV would mean that the audit daemon is about to die, 
so no writing would be possible.

> It occurs to me that this could be worked around, and at the same time you
> could provide some additional level of reliability, if auditd could be run
> from inittab.

It was never intended to be run from that.

> Unfortunately, the only option to auditd seems to be -f, and this prevents
> it from logging in the normal manner.

-f is for foreground debug.

> Are there any other options which might achieve this?

No.

> If not, is this a reasonable feature request?

I'm not sure. There are the issues of how to get rules loaded and logging 
partition availability.

-Steve